US election campaigns hit 100-day stretch
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump today enter the final 100 days of an extraordinary presidential campaign, with the former on a methodical march to energise President Barack Obama's coalition and appeal to the broad mainstream and the latter charting an unconventional path driven by a message of change.
The two nominees and their running-mates will spend August in predictable ways: fleshing out their ideas for governing and mobilising voters in such battlegrounds as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
“The Clinton strategy is to run the traditional race,” Republican strategist Russ Schriefer said. “Develop a ground game. Do your data and analytics. Run television ads. Do policy speeches. Meet with different interest groups that add to your coali- tion.” By contrast, he said, “the Trump campaign is going to continue holding big rallies and tweeting”. He noted that the celebrity mogul has been effective at communicating this way.
Clinton and running-mate Senator Tim Kaine are on the second day of a bus tour of Pennsylvania and Ohio that is focused on Clinton's plan to add jobs and encourage US manufacturing. They are visiting advanced manufacturing facilities — bright spots in states that have seen an exodus of blue-collar jobs — as they take on Trump where he expects to be strongest.
Trump, to rebut criticism from Clinton that he has no detailed agenda to govern the country, intends to deliver policy speeches in August. The speeches will be aimed at impressing ordinary voters more than think-tank experts, aides said.
Clinton's strategists said they can convince voters that Trump's change is so radical that a vote for him amounts to a Faustian bargain that could compromise American values.
With the Olympics opening next weekend and many Americans thinking more about holidays than politics, the dynamics of the race are likely to be stable until the first presidential debate in September.
Clinton’s campaign and its allies are outspending Trump and his backers on the airwaves US$57 million to US$4 million.
The campaigns are strategising their paths to 270 electoral votes. Both sides agree that the battlegrounds include the industrial Midwest and a trio of southern states: Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. Trump feels bullish about New Hampshire because it was one of his biggest primary wins and one of Clinton's worst losses. The two are fighting over Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. Clinton is targeting North Carolina, which went for Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, as a way to narrow Trump's path. Trump sees Michigan and Wisconsin, states Obama carried twice, as possible pickups that would scramble Clinton's calculus. These states are chock full of Trump's base voters: workingclass whites beset by changes in the global economy.