If Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters isn’t in a state of panic right now, it should be.
Senior operatives in Brooklyn just watched Donald Trump spend the last month flailing from one gaffe to another, all while failing to raise as much money as a mildly competitive congressional campaign. As she was bogged down with primary opponent Bernie Sanders in California, Trump never went on offense and instead spent his time insulting or scaring wide swaths of the electorate.
And yet, after the worst month of Trump’s campaign, she’s clinging to a lead in most swing state polls that’s within the margin of error. It’s time for someone in Brooklyn to pull the fire alarm. Her team has known for months what a deeply flawed candidate she is, and they smartly decided to make this election a referendum on Trump. Team Clinton has already spent millions on ads painting Trump as a crass buffoon. They’ve stayed on message for the last month while avoiding any unforced errors lately. Their media coverage has markedly improved since pivoting to the general, with the press fawning over her recent foreign policy speech as her best to date. She should be ahead by double digits today.
The pundits have been reporting that Trump’s month in the wilderness cost him support in the latest round of polling because that’s what Beltway conventional wisdom dictates. But any decent Clinton strategist knows the numbers are telling a different, and much scarier, story for her.
She’s tied in North Carolina, up 3 in Pennsylvania, and up 2 in Ohio. In one poll this week, 49 percent of voters said it was very important to them to make sure Trump is not elected President. But in that same poll, only 42 percent were willing to vote for Clinton, meaning even people who are dead-set against Trump can’t bring themselves to vote for her. It’s not hard to guess why. Of the 56 percent who have an unfavorable view of her, 86 percent said it was either because she is not trustworthy or corrupt. Ouch.
Robby Mook is learning that even $300 million dollars and 700 staffers might not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So what do they do now? After watching the Clinton playbook this cycle, it’s a good bet they’re going to stay the course.
If you only watched frenetic cable news coverage of Trump’s fundraising failures, it would be easy to think money only matters because it looks good on an FEC report. But in reality, it only looks good on an FEC report because the money matters. Campaigning is like a treadmill that keeps speeding up. Even if Trump gets on board now, he can’t catch up.
This is why her campaign will focus their money and manpower on turnout, which means funding an army of state-based “field” staff who organize volunteers to canvass neighborhoods and convince their likely voters to bother to go vote on Election Day. This starts with data to figure out who might be willing to vote for your candidate and, as the weeks go by, increasingly becomes less about persuasion and more about physically getting them to the polls. Political scientists found Obama’s ground game in 2008 increased his vote share by one to three points, depending on the state. The point being: If only 42 percent of people are willing to vote for your candidate, you’d better make sure every single one votes. And based on Clinton’s current polling, 3 points could be the difference between having cabinet meetings and just having cabinets.
And if you’re wondering whether her campaign has considered just shelving her for the next few months and hoping no one notices, the answer probably lies in the fact that its been over 200 days since her last press conference. The last time she held a true press conference, we were just putting away our turkey basters, the State Department IG hadn’t issued its report that said she’d failed to comply with department policies, and she hadn’t received a single vote. Hiding their candidate is exactly what the Clinton campaign is doing.
It’s hard to imagine Trump will make the rest of this race as easy for Clinton as he has the last few weeks. He’s having a significantly better few days, and Brexit only helps his momentum. The fantasy within the Clinton campaign that they could easily take down Trump by calling him “dangerously incoherent” should be giving way to reality after this batch of polling.
Clinton is such a deeply flawed candidate that her staff is learning they can’t even run up the score against Trump during the worst month of his campaign. The fact is that most Americans have formed an opinion of Hillary Clinton over the span of her decades in the public eye, and for more than half the country, it’s not a good one. The last month has proven that making this election a Trump referendum may not be enough to erase Clinton’s negatives.
But with 700 staff and tens of millions in the bank, maybe the Clinton campaign knows what you call the candidate with record high negatives who only wins by a few electoral votes on Election Day: Madame President.
Sarah Isgur Flores is a Republican strategist who has worked on three Republican presidential campaigns, including most recently as the Deputy Campaign Manager for Carly Fiorina. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School.
