Bitter campaign heads to the finish; Texas track record favors Trump

Two days to go

WASHINGTON — A swirling season of discontent in the presidential election could end Tuesday night in a jarring photo finish.

In the final sprint, more than 30 million Americans already have cast ballots for one of two historically unpopular choices — Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton — locked in a rancorous contest to discredit the other.

In a matchup that turns less on policy than personal character, the election’s twists have — for some voters — come to resemble a reality TV show: one contender accused of mishandling classified emails, the other of mishandling women.

The winner will have a historic biography: Clinton would be the first woman to occupy the Oval Office; Trump would be the first president to get there straight from a corporate boardroom.

In Texas, with a recordbreaking 15 million registered voters, early voting totals were markedly higher than in 2012. By Saturday, more than 4.5 million people had voted in the Lone Star State’s 15 most populous counties — nearly a third of all the state’s registered voters. Close to a million were in Harris County, about half of its registered voters.

Although the state still skews Republican, Democrats are looking at heavy Latino turnout in Houston and the Rio Grande Valley as an omen of a large national turnout for women, Hispanics and other minorities who see the New York billionaire trading in misogyny and racial rhetoric.

“I voted for Hillary at the start of early voting, and so did thousands of others, and my prediction is that she will do better in Texas than the Republicans think she will,” said Rose Gutierrez, a Clinton volunteer in Houston. “The momentum is against Donald Trump.”

Trump, in turn, is buoyed by a surge of blue-collar white voters electrified by his brassy style of political-incorrectness — a brand of nativist politics that portrays Clinton as the symbol of an economic malaise that has plagued large swaths

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of the nation’s industrial heartland.

“This election is about the people taking back Washington from the political establishment and the special interests,” said Brandon Sterling, a small business owner in Montgomery County who initially supported Texas Republican Ted Cruz. “That’s where Trump is. He’s not perfect, by any stretch, but sometimes you have to go with the team you agree with the most.”

Darkening the mood further: Trump’s shots at an election he claims is “rigged” by a corrupt Washington establishment. That charge has been answered by Democrats’ counter-allegations of politically timed FBI disclosures about Clinton’s emails and other Clintonera controversies.

The chaser: intelligence officials’ suspicions of possible Russian meddling in the race, possibly through computer hacking and a constant drip of WikiLeaks revelations that has damaged Clinton in the late-going.

Mobilizing voters

Amid the crossfire, polls show little room for error on either side. Nationally, the race has tightened in the last week, with Clinton falling from a clear singledigit lead to the margin of error in many polls. However, she retains her advantage in the Electoral College, which could be decided by a half-dozen battleground states where each campaign is trying to stretch out the other.

Campaign operatives say the final test may be which campaign best mobilizes their deeply polarized partisans, many suspicious of each other and the democratic system’s fundamental institutions.

Trump has seized on his recent momentum to try to breach the Electoral College’s “Blue Wall” of Democratic domination in big, populous states. He has poured resources in recent days into Michigan, Wisconsin and New Mexico, Democratic-leaning states that his strategists think could flip and help push him over the critical 270 electoral vote threshold.

In a memo to supporters early last week, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said the campaign was planning a massive $140 million ad blitz in battleground states “to lead us to victory.”

Clinton, too, has gone on a spending spree, fueled by a huge cash advantage over Trump — at least as of Oct. 20, when she reported $62 million in cash on hand, compared with Trump’s war chest of $16 million.

Both campaigns have reported huge surges in donations since then, particularly in small-donor and online contributions.

Their endgame plans rolled out as FBI Director James Comey shook the election by informing Congress that his agents would extend their probe into potentially classified emails found on the laptop of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton aidede-camp Huma Abedin.

The disclosure played into Trump’s narrative of an unseemly Clinton “cabal,” spawning a new ad tying Clinton to Weiner, the subject of multiple “sexting” scandals.

Clinton, too, has focused her closing argument on her opponent’s character, running ads showing children “watching” Trump’s many public antics insulting women, minorities and the disabled.

Clinton also has labored to bolster enthusiasm among minorities, particularly black voters who helped propel President Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 with overwhelming turnouts in such states as North Carolina, Florida and Ohio.

Democrats, however, have been underwhelmed by black turnout so far, a concern that Obama raised in an interview with black radio host Tom Joyner. “The African-American vote right now is not as solid as it needs to be,” Obama said, warning that a Clinton loss could undermine “everything we’ve done.”

Surrounded by celebs

Democrats also have enlisted the aid of popular surrogates, such as first lady Michelle Obama, rapper Jay Z and his pop star wife Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Jennifer Lopez.

Trump, seeking to close a historic gender gap with women, deployed his daughter Ivanka, as well as his wife Melania, who gave a speech Thursday in Berwyn, Pa., a swing suburban region in a critical battleground state.

Trump’s move in Pennsylvania represents a bet on late-breaking support among independents and traditional blue-collar workers, particularly working-class white men. His task is offsetting the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, by turning out Republican voters in conservative suburbs and rural communities outside the city such as Bucks, Chester, Lancaster and Dauphin counties.

Trump also has sought to reinforce his support among social conservatives, particularly in the Midwest, where some evangelical voters are troubled by his crass comments about women — compounded by a leaked 2005 video showing him bragging about trying to seduce a married woman and groping others.

Some Christian conservatives already were skeptical of Trump’s past support for abortion rights, as well as a number of offcolor comments in a slew of past interviews.

Trump’s latest efforts to repair the damage included Cruz, his most bitter rival in the Republican primaries. Six months after calling Trump “utterly amoral,” Cruz stumped for the candidate in Michigan and Iowa, where evangelical primary voters once had flocked to the junior senator of Texas. Cruz made clear Trump is part of a straight-Republican ticket, suggesting conservatives should vote for “the whole enchilada.” Meanwhile, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was stumping for Trump in Florida.

A recent Monmouth University poll in Missouri showed the dividends in Trump’s strategy, with solid gains among reluctant conservatives. “In a trend we have seen in other red states, Republican-leaning voters in Missouri look like they are coming home to support their party’s nominee despite any misgivings they may have about him,” poll director Patrick Murray said.

In a battle of misgivings, Trump — solidly trailing after three mixed debate performances — was thrown a lifeline by Comey’s email announcement, which turned the national conversation back to Clinton.

After mounting speculation about any potential Clinton “mandate,” her Cabinet and Supreme Court picks — or, among Republicans, her impeachment — her election has started to look less inevitable. In recent days, Clinton partisans have begun to express a range of emotions on Twitter ranging from mild concern to panic.

Late Clinton spending in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and New Mexico also has reinforced the impression of a campaign playing defense.

Political prognosticators like “Five Thirty Eight’s” Nate Silver still rated Clinton the heavy favorite on Saturday — saying she has a 65 percent chance of winning the presidency — owing largely to her edge in early voting and in swing states like Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

“While the news of additional emails and an FBI investigation will be damaging to the Clinton campaign — to an extent — it is not the death knell that Republicans claim it to be,” said Neil Levesque, head of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics & Political Library at Saint Anselm College. “The investigation has hardened the resolve and invigorated party loyalists on both sides.”

Trump aims to surprise

While some neutral analysts remain skeptical Trump can reach 270 electoral votes, his strategists see a path to victory through the pundit-defying twists and turns that have marked every mile of his political journey.

Both sides also claim a secret reserve of new voters who may not show up in polling surveys. Trump partisans have talked about a vast army of conservative white supporters who will surprise the nation on Election Day.

That prediction, if it bears out, would defy the GOP’s 2012 “autopsy” that argued for greater outreach to Hispanics and other minorities to keep up with changing demographics in Texas and the rest of the nation.

Democrats, meanwhile, see hidden support in the record new voter registrations being recorded in Texas and other states with large Latino populations.

Many Latinos think that a robust voter mobilization effort spurred by Trump’s incendiary remarks and hard-edged proposals will pay off for Clinton. Polls suggest they could be right.

Latino Decisions pollster Gabriel Sanchez predicted on Friday that Clinton will capture 80 percent of the Latino vote across the country, based on 5,500 interviews in recent weeks, a significant increase over the 71 percent won by Obama in 2012. Sanchez also projected a sizable increase in Latino turnout, from 11.2 million four years ago to more than 13 million and possibly approaching 15 million on Tuesday.

Latino activists said last week that they had knocked on nearly 1.2 million doors in battleground states in a campaign aimed at first-time voters or Latinos who vote rarely or not at all.

“These low-propensity voters are turning out to be a game-changer,” said Kika Matos, of the Center for Community Change Action, a Washington, D.C.based advocacy group. “We believe that this PAC campaign will in the end put the election out of reach for Donald Trump, and that is exactly what we set out to do.”

In Florida, which has seen an influx of Puerto Rican voters fleeing their island’s economic miseries, the Hispanic share of the electorate has increased by 2 percent since 2012.

“It is obviously an electorate agitated by the political narrative of this election,” said Maria Rodriguez, who heads an organization that claims to have knocked on a million doors in eight Florida counties.

Clinton also is counting on her more highly developed campaign operations on the ground in the battleground states to help her close the deal in the final days. Yet, in an election pitting two figures with historically high negative ratings, both sides can reasonably bank on soft support for the other candidate to eke out a surprise, 11th-hour victory.

To Thomas Brunell, an election expert at the University of Texas at Dallas, the negative dynamic of the race will break newground, no matter who wins.

“Hillary Clinton’s negatives were over 50 percent, which is a critical number, and then the Republicans nominated someone with even worse negatives,” Brunell said. “There’s this line that both of these candidates are terrible. And how do we know? Well, because each one may lose to the other.”

Echoing that sentiment is Raven Spears, a Katy data specialist who said she has voted for every Republican ticket since 2000: “This is an election between bad and badder. One will win. My vote is for the least bad.”