The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The latest from the race for the presidency,
Democrat slipping in polls after end of FBI investigation.
Hillary Clinton knows she has a trust problem, and it may be the biggest threat to her campaign for the White House.
She’s tried using humility to fix it, deflecting blame and acknowledging mistakes. But so far none of her attempts have worked.
A growing majority of Americans say they distrust Clinton, and she’s slipping nationally and in battleground states in match-ups with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump after the conclusion of an FBI investigation involving her handling of top-secret information as America’s top diplomat.
A New York Times/CBS national survey released late last week found Clinton’s six-point lead over Trump in June evaporating to a tie, with each garnering 40 percent support. A whopping 67 percent over voters said Clinton is not honest or trustworthy, up five points from June. Trump fared only modestly better at 62 percent, unchanged from the previous month.
A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found Clinton’s comfortable leads in Florida and Pennsylvania last month narrowing to a dead heat, with Ohio remaining a tieeven as Clinton and her campaign spend millions in TV ads in all three states. A key shift in the survey was that Clinton lost a large lead for having “higher moral standards,” while Trump widened his lead on who’s more “honest and trustworthy.”
The trust issue haunts the presumptive Democratic nominee, even against an opponent that some surveys show is the most unpopular in the history of modern polling. Questions of trustworthiness are as old as the Clinton brand itself: Former President Bill Clinton faced questions about his honesty in both of his campaigns for the White House, the result of a host of controversies including revelations during the 1992 primary campaign about his extramarital affairs and the investigation into into a land deal known as Whitewater, which also embroiled his wife.
But Bill Clinton overcame the trust deficit with empathy. At the time, he consistently scored high in surveys when voters were asked whether he cared about their needs and problems. Hillary Clinton readily admits she doesn’t have the same political skills as her husband. She has a modest empathy advantage over Trump, but neither scores well: a Fox News poll released in late June found that 45 percent of Americans said “cares about people like me” describes Clinton, while 35 percent said it describes Trump.
In recent weeks, Clinton has attempted to confront her shortcomings head on.
“I personally know I have work to do on this front. A lot of people tell pollsters they don’t trust me. I don’t like hearing that and I’ve thought a lot about what’s behind it,” Clinton said on June 27 at the International Women’s Forum in Chicago.
She admitted making “mistakes,” which she didn’t specify, but also suggested she’s misunderstood.
“Now, maybe we can persuade people to change their minds by marshaling facts and making arguments to rebut negative attacks,” she said. “You can’t just talk someone into trusting you, you’ve got to earn it. So yes, I can say the reason I sometimes sound careful with my words is not that I’m hiding something, it’s just that I’m careful with my words.”
As they gear up for an intense 15 weeks after this month’s Democratic convention and work to elect the first woman president, Clinton’s allies see more than a dash of sexism in perceptions of her as dishonest and untrustworthy. Many point to a body of research that says Americans tend to view ambitious and successful women more negatively than they do men.
“As with all women leaders, Hillary has been held to a different standard her entire career,” said Marcy Stech, a spokeswoman for EMILY’s List. “But she hasn’t let that stop her from doing what’s right, no matter who thinks it’s unpopular.”
In keeping with other themes of her campaign, Clinton is less shy than she was in 2008 about discussing the sexism that she and other powerful women face in American society.