THE CHALLENGES FACING HILLARY CLINTON [MUST READ]

With some people I know in panic mode about the latest opinion polls showing Donald Trump performing well in a prospective fall campaign against Hillary Clinton, I thought it might be worth stepping back a bit and looking at the prospects for such a race in November.

For Democrats and others alarmed by Trump’s advance, the outlook is reassuring, but not entirely so. Assuming that Hillary Clinton wraps up the Democratic nomination pretty soon, she will be the firm favorite to win the general election. But she faces some significant challenges, not least of which is confronting a demagogue who daily traduces her and her husband.

Arguably, the biggest factor in Clinton’s favor is demography. The Obama coalition of minority voters, young people, single women, and highly educated white voters of both sexes, which has seen the Democrats to victories in 2008 and 2012, remains intact. Indeed, it is growing. Meanwhile, the Republican base of older, whiter, and less educated voters continues to shrink.

Back in March, I spoke with the political scientist Ruy Teixeira, who has written widely on the Obama coalition, and he pointed out that the minority share of the electorate will likely increase by another two percentage points this year, to twenty-eight per cent. Clinton, as she has demonstrated during the Democratic primary campaign, has strong support among minority voters, and she also scores well with other elements of the Obama coalition, such as working women and the highly educated.

Unless Trump can attract more minority voters, which seems unlikely, he will need to rack up huge majorities among white voters. To carry Ohio, for example, Teixeira reckons that Trump would have to win the white working-class vote by twenty-two or twenty-three percentage points, and hold on to, or even expand, Mitt Romney’s double-digit margin of victory among college-educated white voters, who might be put off by Trump’s extremism.

The political map should also be friendly to Clinton. In every election since 1992, the Democrats have carried eighteen states that have a combined total of two hundred and forty-two votes in the Electoral College—just twenty-eight short of the two hundred and seventy needed to assure victory. The Republicans’ base in the Electoral College is smaller: twenty-three states with a hundred and ninety-one electoral votes. As usual, this year’s contest is likely to come down to a dozen or so battleground states. But Clinton, if she holds onto the core Democratic states, will have many more ways to get to two hundred and seventy.

Figures like these—together with the fact that Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in five out of the past six Presidential elections—help to explain why Clinton remains the bettors’ choice to win. At the British online bookmakers, the odds of her being the next President are about 1:2, which means that you have to wager a hundred dollars to win fifty. Trump’s odds are about 2:1. (You bet fifty dollars to win a hundred.) These odds imply that the probability of Clinton winning is 66.7 per cent, and the probability of Trump winning is 33.3 per cent.

Many Democrats may not find these odds very soothing, however. They reflect an improvement in Trump’s prospects since he became the presumptive Republican nominee, one largely based on gains he has made in head-to-head polls against Clinton. On April 15th, in the Real Clear Politics poll of polls, the former Secretary of State was ten points ahead. On Tuesday, Trump took his first lead over his likely opponent, albeit a tiny one that isn’t statistically significant: 43.4 per cent versus 43.2 per cent.

The main factor driving Trump’s surge is that Republicans are consolidating behind him. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey shows that his favorability rating among self-identified G.O.P. voters has risen by thirteen percentage points in the past month. The number of Republicans saying that they would vote for Clinton over Trump has fallen from thirteen per cent to six per cent.

Once Clinton secures the Democratic nomination, she is likely to experience a significant bounce in the polls, too, especially if Sanders endorses her, which I think he will do. Uniting the Democratic Party is essential to Clinton’s candidacy, and Trump’s presence should make it easier to accomplish. Regardless of what Sanders does, there will still be some “Bernie or Bust” Democrats who refuse to vote for Clinton—just as there are still some “Never Trump” Republicans. But precedent suggests that both groups will steadily diminish in size. On the Republican side, it’s already happening.

By the middle of next month, the traditional party lines will probably be drawn, and the campaign proper will begin. At that stage, Clinton will have to overcome at least three hurdles. The first is that she and the Democrats are trying to do something that has only been accomplished once in recent American history: win a third successive Presidential election. Since 1948, when the Democrats won their fifth election in a row, six candidates have tried to extend their party’s control of the White House to a third term: Richard Nixon (1960), Hubert Humphrey (1968), Gerald Ford (1976), George H. W. Bush (1988), Al Gore (2000), and John McCain (2008). Only Bush succeeded.

In each of these elections, the circumstances and personalities were very different. But the tendency to turf the incumbent party after two terms is well established. Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, refers to it as the “time for a change” factor. And it would put any Democrat at a disadvantage this year.

Another issue facing Clinton is more personal, and it’s one she shares with Trump: many Americans don’t like her very much. According to the Huffington Post’s poll average, 40.2 per cent of Americans have a favorable view of Clinton, and 55.4 per cent have an unfavorable view of her.

Of course, many people in the latter group are Republicans. They don’t vote for Democrats anyway, so their animus toward Clinton doesn’t matter very much. What’s more worrying for Clinton is the attitude of Americans who self-identify as independents. (According to the Pew Research Center, they make up about forty per cent of the electorate.) In the latest CBS News/New York Timespoll, fifty-eight per cent of independents said that their view of Clinton was unfavorable; sixty-five per cent said that she didn’t share their values; and sixty-seven per cent said that she was “not honest and trustworthy.”

One consolation for the Clinton campaign is that some of Trump’s numbers are even worse. In that same poll, fifty-seven per cent of independents said that they had an unfavorable view of him; sixty-nine per cent said that he didn’t share their values; and sixty-six per cent said that he was “not honest and trustworthy.”

Even in an era of widespread disillusionment with politicians, these types of numbers are unusual. After looking up the figures from previous Presidential campaigns, the CBS News Web site reported that “Trump and Clinton’s unfavorable ratings continue to be the highest in CBS News/New York Times polls going back to 1984, when the question was first asked.”
The unpopularity of both candidates means that we are entering unexplored terrain. So does Trump’s eagerness to break the normal rules of Presidential politics. In some ways, this is probably good news for Clinton. Her opponent has barely started organizing in Ohio, for example. And his eagerness to dredge up old Clinton scandals, including Whitewater and allegations of sexual misconduct against former President Bill Clinton, unnerves even some Republican commentators. (The other night, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly referred to an attack video the Trump campaign posted on Instagram as “tawdry stuff.”)

In other ways, though, Trump’s unorthodoxy presents a further challenge to Clinton. It adds an element of unpredictability to the campaign, and raises the question of whether she will be able to deal with him more effectively than his rivals in the G.O.P. primary did. So far, she has kept her cool, refusing to engage on the details of his attacks and calling him a “bully” who is “not qualified to be President of the United States.” Meanwhile, a super PAC allied with Clinton has gone after Trump more directly, releasing an ad highlighting his offensive statements about women. The motivating theory here is that the biggest failure Trump’s Republican rivals made was to wait for too long before attacking him. The Clinton campaign is determined not to repeat the error.

In the coming months, we can be sure, the Clinton campaign will seek to portray Trump as an untested and potentially unstable character who lacks any real policy expertise, and whose election would endanger this country and others. In the televised debates, which will be something to behold, Clinton will try to make this case personally. Framing the election in this way plays to her strengths: her experience, her command of policy details, and the widespread perception that she is tough and decisive. In the CBS News/New York Times poll, fifty-four per cent of respondents said that she “has strong qualities of leadership.”

This strategy could well work. The majority of Americans already have serious doubts about Trump: in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, sixty-nine per cent of respondents said that he didn’t have the right temperament and personality to be a good President. But other recent findings offer Trump and his supporters more encouragement. In the CBS News/Times poll, fifty-five per cent of respondents said that he has strong leadership qualities: practically the same rating Clinton received. And, among self-identified moderates, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found, Clinton is currently leading Trump by just two percentage points: forty-five per cent to forty-three per cent. In this group in 2012, the Journal’s Jerry Seib pointed out, President Obama defeated Mitt Romney by fifteen percentage points.

To sum up, Clinton and her staff have a lot of work to do. It’s going to be a long summer.


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Article written by John Cassidy

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