102 DAYS: NOW, THE SPRINT TO NOVEMBER
Here are 3 points that will play in coming months
102 days. More than a year after Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump announced their presidential campaigns, and after months of bitter primaries that took un- expected turns in both parties, the sprint to November has started.
After back-to-back political conventions, here are three things we’ve learned about the political landscape that Clinton and Trump will be running on in the most unpredictable election in a generation.
1. IT’S THIS/CLOSE
In national polls, it’s a tie — at least for now.
That may be a bit misleading, since Trump got a bounce from the Republican convention last week while any bounce from the Democratic convention, which ended Thursday night with Clinton’s acceptance address and fireworks in the Walls Fargo Center here, hasn’t had a chance to be measured.
The most recent nationwide polls averaged by RealClearPolitics.com put Trump at 45.6%, Clinton at 44.7%, a difference of less than a single percentage point. In the nation’s two quintessential swing states, the contest is even closer. In Florida: Trump 43.8%-Clinton 43.5%. In Ohio: Trump 41.8%-Clinton 42.6%.
Senior Democrats are expressing the same bewilderment as Trump’s Republican rivals-over the billionaire businessman’s ability to maintain and increase his support despite provocative statements and misstatements.
“Donald Trump’s getting 15% of the Latino vote ... and in the two Quinnipiac polls, he got zero African-American votes in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and Democratic national chairman, said Thursday at a breakfast with reporters hosted by Bloomberg Politics. “He’s getting clobbered among women. He’s losing college-age white men by 10 points. And somebody please tell me how he’s even or in the margin of error.”
2. FASTEN THE RUST BELT
A half-dozen familiar states are likely to provide the battlegrounds for the fall.
Trump’s no-room-for-error path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House begins with a trio of industrialized states — Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — that are home to many of the working-class white voters who have been drawn to Trump’s message of economic grievance and revival.
If he can carry them, hold the reliably red states and add Florida (not an easy task), Trump wins.
Clinton has more options. She starts with a larger number of electoral votes from reliably blue states. If she can carry Colorado and Virginia, swing states that have been heading in her direction, and then add Florida or Ohio, she wins.
Democrats mock Trump’s suggestion that he could compete in such traditionally Democratic states as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California. “States like Connecticut have come into play,” top Trump strategist Paul Mana- fort insisted. “The same issues that are resonating in Pennsylvania and in Ohio resonate in Connecticut.”
“I absolutely encourage Donald Trump to spend time campaigning in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook responded sarcastically.
In the closest of races, even the single electoral votes available in the two states that allocate them by congressional district could be contested.
3. IT’S NOT ME. IT’S YOU
Clinton and Trump have starkly different résumés and political views, but they share record unpopularity.
Strategists acknowledge the difficulty of changing opinions about public figures who are so well known and so polarizing. The more crucial task for each is to make sure the alternative is seen as more unacceptable — that is, as the greater of two evils.