Be afraid: The
Clinton-Trump general election begins
This will be one of
the ugliest, most divisive elections in American history.
By
Shane Goldmacher
7/29/16, 3:21 PM CET
PHILADELPHIA — For
four days here in this city of brotherly love and the nation’s
founding, Democrats wrapped themselves in the language of patriotism
and positivity, declaring the country would be “stronger together”
as they nominated Hillary Clinton to serve as the first woman
president.
“Love trumps
hate,” came the cheers from the crowd, only days after Donald
Trump’s Republican convention echoed with chants of “Lock her
up!”
But as the 102-day
general election starts, the reality is that both parties, saddled
with two of the most unpopular presidential nominees ever, are
bracing for one of the ugliest and most divisive races in modern
history. And with Trump’s penchant for the unpredictable, a contest
that has already stretched the boundaries of traditional American
political discourse is unlikely to become more civil.
For all the talk of
hope and optimism in Philadelphia, fear remains the most potent
emotion stirring the base — of both parties. President Barack Obama
warned pointedly of “homegrown demagogues” this week in the same
breath as “fascists” and “jihadists.”
Clinton and the
Democrats are selling the fear of what America would look like under
a President Donald Trump to gin up turnout, just as Trump is selling
fear of a dangerous, diminished and diversifying America under Obama,
and himself as the lone man who can “make America great again.”
In her acceptance
speech Thursday, Clinton urged the public to “imagine, imagine”
the idea of a Trump presidency, calling him temperamentally unfit. “A
man you can bait with a tweet is not a man you can trust with nuclear
weapons,” she said
“I alone can fix
it,” Trump said a week ago.
But the back-to-back
conventions portrayed two parties that seemed at times as though they
were speaking to and about entirely different countries. The
Republicans featured families of people killed by illegal immigrants;
the Democrats featured the children of the undocumented who live in
fear in the shadows. The Republicans complained of a rising tide of
crime; Democrats bragged about a rising tide of health care coverage.
Democrats embraced “black lives matter”; Republicans celebrated
“blue lives matter.”
Trump, whose latest
book was called “Crippled America,” said in a statement Thursday
that, “Democrats have been speaking about a world that doesn’t
exist.”
“A world where
America has full employment, where there’s no such thing as radical
Islamic terrorism, where the border is totally secured, and where
thousands of innocent Americans have not suffered from rising crime
in cities like Baltimore and Chicago,” he said.
Democrats are
thrilled to be occupying sunnier high ground.
If Clinton wins
Florida, she can take the White House simply by carrying all the
states that Democrats have won in every election since 1992.
“When I look at
our American history, hope has always trumped fear,” Tom Perez, the
secretary of labor who was considered by the Clinton campaign as a
potential running mate, said in an interview. “His campaign is to
prey on people’s fears and that doesn’t work.”
The strategy is not
without risk.
While Obama’s
approval rating hovers above 50 percent — far higher than Trump’s
or Clinton’s — many Democrats are burdened with the nagging
concern that 2016 could ultimately be about upending the status quo,
and that Trump, for all his flaws, is a vessel better suited to that
aggrieved cause than Clinton, no matter how many “change maker”
signs delegates waved this week.
Still, the nation’s
shifting demographics give the Democrats a head start on the path to
270 Electoral College votes this year. If Clinton wins Florida, she
can take the White House simply by carrying all the states that
Democrats have won in every election since 1992, plus the District of
Columbia and New Mexico, which they’ve carried in five of the past
six races.
“I sleep really
well at night in this campaign unless I’ve had coffee in the
afternoon,” Chris Lehane, a longtime Democratic strategist who
worked in the Clinton White House in the 1990s, said of the 2016
landscape. “He has a math problem. I don’t think you can be where
he is with millennials, women, married women, people of color,
particularly Hispanics, and have it work out.”
Trump, in contrast,
is trying to create an entirely new political map and coalition
anchored by disaffected blue-collar white voters, flipping back
Pennsylvania after nearly three decades in the Democratic column and
states across the industrial Midwest.
“America is
already great” — Barack Obama
Marlon Marshall,
director of state campaigns for Clinton, told POLITICO, that the 2012
reelection map for Obama “begins to set the tone for what a map
could look like” in 2016.
In Obama’s
valedictory address on Wednesday, he gave what amounted to a plea for
his coalition of minorities, young voters and women to come out again
for Clinton, praising her as his rightful successor. “You can’t
afford to stay home,” he urged them. And when Clinton emerged to
hug her ex-rival afterward, it was the starkest representation yet
that she has embraced the notion that she is campaigning for Obama’s
third term.
And with that comes
the weight of owning the current state of affairs.
“America is
already great,” as Obama himself said. “America is already
strong.”
But Democrats are
nervous that even while Trump has failed to build a modern political
organization, squandered most the past two months, been accused of
racism by his own party, neither aired TV ads nor reserved time for
the fall, has praised foreign strongmen including Saddam Hussein and
Vladimir Putin, the race is essentially tied.
Trump has taken the
lead in some surveys after the GOP convention, despite the disunity
and disorganization on display in Cleveland. He has inflamed
controversy almost daily, the latest this week with his public call
for Russia to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” of
Clinton’s from her private server, essentially inviting a foreign
nation to hack correspondence from her time as as the country’s top
diplomats
Inside the Clinton
campaign, campaign sources say there are ongoing conversations about
just how much to focus on Trump’s clear vulnerabilities versus
trying to sell Clinton’s strengths to a skeptical public.
“People don’t
know how much she’s accomplished and how big an effect it’s had
on people’s lives,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook,
said to Politico’s On Message podcast this week. “But here’s
what I will say. I don’t think people will fully appreciate who she
is until, knock on wood, she’s elected president.”
Of course, that
would be too late for the campaign. So far, she and her super PAC
have had the airwaves in the battleground states virtually to
themselves as they’ve run in heavy rotation ads featuring Trump
mocking a disabled reporter that strategists said has tested off the
charts with voters.
But the concern is
that a relentlessly negative fall campaign could depress turnout this
fall. Obama himself summed up the challenge as he hammered Trump in
his speech amid boos from the audience.
“Don’t boo,”
he chided them. “Vote.”
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