Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have struggled to explain why the polls keep tightening, and frustration appears to be setting in now that it looks increasingly likely the 2016 election will be a close one.
The Democratic nominee herself acknowledged her polling problem this week during a video address to the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Recommended Stories
Clinton first listed all her qualifications as a candidate.
She then added, “Having said all this, ‘Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?’ you might ask.”
“Well, the choice for working families has never been clearer,” Clinton added in her pre-recorded address Wednesday. “I need your help to get Donald Trump’s record out to everybody. Nobody should be fooled.”
Clinton’s campaign has outspent GOP nominee Donald Trump on nearly every front, including placing more than $20 million on ads in Pennsylvania. The Republican candidate has spent only a fraction of that amount on advertising in the Keystone State.
Though the Democratic nominee is ahead of Trump by a wide margin in Pennsylvania, she leads nationally by only two points, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.
Clinton’s supporters have blamed her poor showing in the polls on everything from third-party candidates to the supposed ignorance of the American voters. And her supporters appear to be growing increasingly frustrated with Trump’s ability to stay competitive in the race for the White House.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., for example, said Clinton has a poor approval rating because voters aren’t paying attention to all of her strengths as a candidate.
“Well, the biggest concern is, I think, the American public are not paying attention to the details, the specifics, her experience,” the Maryland lawmaker said Wednesday.
Earlier this month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., argued Clinton’s lousy numbers are the result of the existence of surprisingly competitive third-party candidates.
“I think that polls are a reflection of some voters going to the third party. The third and fourth party. The tightening that some of these undecideds have gone to that place. Some of the millennials,” Pelosi said in an interview on CNN.
Another Clinton surrogate, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., struggled earlier this month to explain why Clinton isn’t polling better. Like Hoyer, the Missouri senator blamed voters for the tightening race.
“I think in presidential elections, history has shown that the American people do have a penchant for a new, bright and shiny object,” McCaskill said in an MSNBC interview. “There is a lot of dissatisfaction in this country and a sense that we need to blow up the system, and who better to blow up the system than a huckster and a conman?”
“I will say some of it is inexplicable to me, honestly, candidly,” she said.
And then there is Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden, who blamed Clinton-challenger-turned-surrogate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., last month for the Democratic nominee’s polling problem.
“He did do significant damage to Hillary’s negatives,” Tanden said in an interview with Politico.
“I mean, he drove a lot of those negatives, and the truth of it, I mean, just to be candid or honest about it, you know, I think getting those kinds of attacks from another Democrat or another liberal or another progressive is much tougher for Hillary, and it was really hard,” she said.
Sanders, who serves now as a Clinton campaign surrogate, hit the Democratic nominee particularly hard during the primaries over her connections to major Wall Street firms, including the millions of dollars she accepted from giving paid speeches to groups that included Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
“If you look at her trust numbers the last six months of that primary, it was much, those numbers took a much sharper dive and hard to recover from,” said Tanden, who is part of the Clinton transition team leadership.
The former secretary of state, for her part, has responded lately to questions about Trump closing the polling gap by telling reporters, “We’re not taking anything for granted and I knew it would be a close election.”
