Victory in sight, Clinton presses for early voting
DEMOCRAT ASKS VOTERS TO STRENGTHEN HER HAND IN CONGRESS, REPUDIATE REPUBLICANS WHO BACK TRUMP
Hillary Clinton has moved aggressively to press her advantage in the presidential race, urging black voters in North Carolina to vote early and punish Republican officeholders for supporting Donald Trump, even as Trump’s party increasingly concedes he is unlikely to recover in the polls.
Aiming to turn her edge over Trump into an unbreakable lead, Clinton has been pleading with core Democratic constituencies to get out and vote in states where balloting has already begun. By running up a lead well in advance of the November 8 election in states like North Carolina and Florida, she could virtually eliminate Trump’s ability to make a late comeback.
At times, Clinton is going beyond seeking simply a victory over Trump, asking voters to strengthen her hand in Congress and repudiate not just Trump but also Republicans who have accommodated or endorsed him.
Sign of lopsided race
After lashing Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania in a speech on Saturday, Clinton urged voters at an outdoor rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, to elect a Democratic governor and to turn Senator Richard Burr out of office.
Calling Burr’s Democratic challenger, Deborah Ross, “exactly the kind of partner I need in the United States Senate,” Clinton upbraided Burr for failing to reject Trump.
“Unlike her opponent, Deborah has never been afraid to stand up to Donald Trump,” Clinton said, adding, “She knows that people of courage and principles need to come together to reject this dangerous and divisive agenda.”
It is a sign of the extraordinarily lopsided nature of the presidential race that, even in a Republican-controlled state like North Carolina, Clinton is in a position to exhort voters to hand control of the Senate to Democrats. Though she is still not broadly popular, Clinton has cast her candidacy — and now, perhaps, her party — as a safe harbour for voters across the political mainstream who find Trump intolerable.
Seeming to peer past the end of the race, Clinton offered herself as a figure of conciliation during a visit to a black church in Raleigh on Sunday.
“There are many people in our country willing to reach across the divide, regardless of what you’ve heard in this campaign,” she said.
For Republicans, blunting Clinton’s ability to carry other Democrats into office has become the overriding imperative in the final weeks of the 2016 race. With Trump so diminished as a competitor for Clinton, Republicans say they will now ask voters in newly explicit terms to elect a divided government rather than giving Clinton unchecked power.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful super PAC that supports Republicans in the House of Representatives, is to begin running ads in the coming days that attack Democratic candidates as “rubber stamps” for Clinton and urge voters in swing districts to support Republicans instead.
Mike Shields, the group’s president, said it had tested that message and found it effective in closely contested races, even with voters who are likely to support Clinton over Trump.
“There are many districts where we are going to be running ads that talk about the Democrat being a rubber stamp for Hillary Clinton,” Shields said.