Clinton vulnerabilities

Sanders spotlights Clinton vulnerabilities

With every packed rally, Democrats worry the Vermont senator exposes her weaknesses.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti

Top Democrats aren’t worried about Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton in the primaries. They’re worried about what the popular response to Sanders shows them about Clinton’s vulnerabilities in November.

It’s the quiet chatter among operatives in New York, Washington and beyond: If Clinton’s got so much trouble connecting with people that she’s stuck in a long primary slog against an upstart socialist senator from Vermont with a beyond-parody Brooklyn Jewish accent, that’s because at least some of those voters are more driven by being anti-Hillary than pro-Bernie.

In Iowa, and at every packed rally, he’s exposed her problems: with having a clear and rallying message, with inspiring passion, with being seen as inauthentic, with being seen as having too close connections to Wall Street, with attracting young voters and with a media narrative that Clinton supporters blame for always being more interested in looking for Clinton alternatives than discussing Clinton successes.

A lot of that’s unfair, top Democrats supporting Clinton say. But that doesn’t mean Clinton won’t have to address those issues if she wins the nomination and goes up against a Republican strong enough to compete with her.

The number many Democrats are focused on out of Iowa is the 84 percent of voters under 30 who caucused for Sanders. They fret about the people at Sanders’ victory party Monday night who started shouting “Liar!” when Clinton called herself a progressive in her speech — many of them so young, said former Pennsylvania Gov. and Clinton superfan Ed Rendell, that they weren’t yet born when Clinton was already working on progressive causes like health care and children’s issues.

“She has to walk a fine line throughout the rest of the primaries to win, and at the same time, not win in a way that makes these voters so disaffected that they don’t vote in the fall,” Rendell said. “I don’t think there’s any danger that they vote for the Republican candidate, but there’s a danger that they sit home.”

Clinton supporters are reluctant to admit how deep and wide some of the antipathy toward her runs, but to the extent they do, they blame years of Republican attacks that have now been stepped up by the Republican National Committee and GOP super PACs attacking Clinton in the middle of the primary race.

Anyone who’s supporting Sanders because they oppose Clinton, said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), needs “to think back to why do they think that, because that’s the fingerprints of the Republican smear machine all over that.”

Clinton supporters prefer to highlight other Iowa numbers: data points that look like problems for Sanders, including his losing nonwhite voters by 24 percentage points, despite insisting on the campaign trail that he’d win with minority voters once they heard his message, and his loss among voters who said their top issue is the economy — the motivating cause of Sanders’ campaign — by 9 points.

As for the giant youth gap, a Clinton campaign aide expressed confidence that young people will support her once the choice is down to the former secretary of state and whichever Republican emerges, especially as they push Clinton’s positions on climate change, gun control and college affordability. Pressed on the youth issue, the aide pointed to the strength Clinton showed in Iowa, and in polls among voters over 55 years old. That group reliably votes, and losing them had a lot to do with the Democrats’ decimation in the 2010 and 2014 midterms.

Many Clinton supporters feel that the youth question gets conflated with the enthusiasm and authenticity questions, and point to numbers like those out of last weekend’s Des Moines Register poll, which showed that 73 percent of her Iowa supporters say they’re enthusiastic about her becoming the nominee.

But there’s still concern about turning them out for Clinton in the general election.

“The challenge is not so much support, but energy. At the end of the day, when you have our nominee, can the person who is not our nominee’s energy be carried over to the person who gets the nomination?” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), expressing cautious optimism that Clinton would be able to.

The Sanders campaign says that what the senator has tapped into against Clinton is the reason they think he wins the electability argument.

“Thus far in the process, only Bernie Sanders has demonstrated the ability and capacity to turn out that vote, Secretary Clinton has not,” said Sanders chief strategist Tad Devine. “And indeed the results of the Iowa caucuses showed her deep weakness on this front.”

Devine predicted that if Sanders wins New Hampshire, as the polls are predicting, the panic among Clinton supporters will quickly surge.

“It’s going to be hard for a lot of them to sort of understand what it means for her to even lose. This is like, you know, Columbus sailing out into the ocean and people thinking they’re going to fall off the edge of the Earth,” Devine said. “They don’t conceive how this could happen. I understand their inability to understand it.”

If Clinton’s the nominee, Rendell said he thinks she’ll need Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) out in force for the general election, summoning the connection with voters that Clinton hasn’t been able to make on her own. Others are counting on President Barack Obama to light up his coalition of young and minority voters for her. Many note that the question of how Obama would mobilize Clinton’s supporters haunted him throughout 2008, but that Democrats did, in the end, come together that fall. Clinton’s campaign points out that Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable numbers are better now than Obama’s were then, and voters came around to him.

But all of it circles back to a core struggle of Clinton’s campaign: how to make weathered realism the stuff that dreams are made of.

“There’s a lot of us who could help her do that,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). “The young kids like the unfiltered anger, but anyone who’s been around here knows if you really want to solve income inequality, if you want to solve health care and if you want to solve college affordability, you have to make it happen. Anger alone won’t make it happen. Experience, pragmatism, along with a lot of energy, will.”

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who’s endorsed Clinton but whose relationship with her has been complicated at best since he endorsed Obama in 2008, said he thinks there’s a way for her to say Sanders is pushing a fantasy without coming off as a wet blanket.

“Talk about not specifically policy initiatives on income inequality but speak broadly about economic opportunity, about young people in the future. Don’t get into tax credits and specifics, economic opportunity. I’m going to the president who buys you an economic future. Sanders talks about broad economics and a political revolution, what the hell does that mean? She should do the same without compromising her views.”

Resist the urge, Richardson said, to try copying the cool factor and celebrity appeal that Sanders has picked up against Clinton, just as Obama did eight years ago.

“Forget the pollsters who tell you Justin Bieber is 80 percent favorable. Don’t appear with the Justin Biebers,” he said. “You’re a substantive, wonkish candidate. Don’t try to change that.”

“It’s going to require a little nimbleness, a little bit of charm, a little bit of good spirit and a little bit of constant acknowledgment that Bernie has done something important,” Rendell said.

And the Clinton operation, many said, has to do a better job of breaking through the conventional wisdom that’s crystallized around her and that for months let Sanders seem like an exciting alternative who’s created a movement.

“What I think people have missed is that there’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for Hillary out there. You can talk about Bernie all you want, but in Iowa he said if he got 170,000 people out to vote, he was going to win — and she still won,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.). “And that’s because she had a lot of enthusiastic supporters who came out, and that’s what’s happening in New Hampshire, too.”

Or the Clinton campaign could just wait out the next few months as Clinton builds up more primary wins and is likely able to gradually shift from the campaign against Sanders and toward the Republicans, with or without the swooning.

“She wears better with time,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, who endorsed Obama in 2008 but was with Clinton early this time around, arguing she’s the one ready for a tough job. “She’s somebody who voters grow more fond of the more they see her on the campaign trail.”