Plans to bounce back

Inside Clinton's plans to bounce back in New Hampshire

Bernie Sanders might get the win, but the Clinton camp will make sure there's an asterisk attached to it.

By Annie Karni

Eight years ago New Hampshire was Hillary Clinton’s savior and sanctuary — in 2016 it’s just another stop on what she now knows will be a months-long slog of state primaries.

Clinton didn’t win by much in Iowa, but it was enough to deny a surprisingly strong Bernie Sanders bragging rights to winning both first-in-the-nation contests — a claim that would have seriously damaged a front-runner’s campaign long steeped in inevitability.

On Tuesday, groggy campaign officials — fresh off a middle-of-the-night flight out of Des Moines — were not only downplaying their own chances of coming out on top amid polls showing Sanders on top by 20 or more points — they were lowering the significance of any victory here for Sanders, casting it as a nearly worthless inevitability for a nearly home-state senator.

“The home court advantage for Bernie makes the win an asterisk for him,” said a top Clinton campaign aide, reflecting the views of a half-dozen advisers interviewed by POLITICO over the last few days.

Thus far, Clinton — and her husband Bill, a valued surrogate in the state’s mostly-white rural and suburban counties — haven’t indicated they planned to cut back on a week-long schedule of day-to-day campaigning, but one top Clinton official told POLITICO “schedules are always subject to change.”

The feeling at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters these days isn’t about pulling off an upset — it’s about closing the gap, and halting Sanders’ momentum by denying him an easy win in a state that should be a cakewalk. In some respects New Hampshire is the only state where Team Clinton can flip the inevitability script — with Sanders positioned as the favorite with lots to lose.

The campaign also appears to be turning its gaze to the battles that follow. Bill Clinton, for instance, who spent all of last week campaigning in Iowa and will travel to South Carolina on Wednesday. At a rally in Nashua on Tuesday morning, Bill Clinton also told NBC's Andrea Mitchell on the rope line that “nobody from a state bordering New Hampshire has ever lost a Democratic primary to a non-incumbent president.”

On Tuesday night, Clinton’s campaign arrived via charter flight at 5 a.m. and hit the ground running. Bleary-eyed aides were shuffling around the lobby of the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, shuttling between events and television hits. Yet at her speech there Tuesday morning, Hillary Clinton referred to New Hampshire as Sanders’ backyard.

Still, there are downsides in downplaying the importance of the Granite State for both Clintons — no other state has provided them with comparable emotional validation and political momentum.

Bill Clinton’s surprising second-place finish here in 1992, amid the first wave of sexual misconduct allegations, helped propel him to the nomination -— and coinage of the self-congratulatory moniker ‘The Comeback Kid.’ Hillary Clinton owes the state even more — after suffering a humbling loss in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, she came into New Hampshire with a near-double-digit deficit in the polls, and on the wrong side of Barack Obama’s hope-and-change momentum.

Then, the unexpected: A few days before balloting, she let down her icy facade and showed real emotion about the toll the campaign was taking on her at a Portsmouth coffee shop, and stunned a cocky Obama a few days later.

This time promises to be different, and diminished. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both arrived here early Tuesday morning, and lowered expectations along with their landing gear.

“The Clintons have been here for decades,” Sanders strategist Tad Devine told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Tuesday. “She’s got huge advantages.” A Clinton aide countered — arguing that Sanders, not Clinton was the New Hampshire veteran —by pointing out Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981, while Bill Clinton didn’t run in the New Hampshire primary until 1991.

“She needs to beat expectations and her expectations are so low right now that she’s in a good position to do so,” said Neil Levesque, executive director of Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics. For months the campaign has been talking about Sanders’ home court advantage, as well as the demographic upper hand he has in a state that is white and liberal-leaning.

Another factor cutting into the drama on the Democratic side is the high-octane Republican contest shaping up after Ted Cruz’s win over heavily favored Donald Trump — and Marco Rubio’s near defeat of the billionaire — a three-way fight that promises to heat up over the next few days. “They look at the television screen and see that they might face Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio,” Levesque said, “it may be that they start thinking who can successfully win for their team.”

It doesn’t mean the campaign isn’t trying. Sanders is outspending Clinton on the airwaves about 2 to 1, but since the summer the Clinton campaign has been building a robust ground organization here. And for two weekends now, it has conducted dry Get Out The Vote runs. Her Nashua rally Tuesday morning had 1,100 people come out— such a large gathering that the fire marshal had to shut it down. The campaign tried to get the 200 supporters tickets to events later in the week.

The campaign has 10,178 volunteers who have played a role, 11 offices and eight “get out the vote” centers, which are smaller organizing hubs around the state. A Clinton campaign official said Sanders has more paid staffers on the ground here, but Clinton has a larger army of volunteers.

In recent weeks, the campaign has also started mailing back the commit to vote cards it has been collecting since the summer — the cards are perforated and one section is a pledge to work for Clinton, and the other is information added to the database that is then sent back.

Between that well-oiled field operation, her endorsements from Gov. Maggie Hassan and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and the Clinton family’s history with New Hampshire, the state isn’t as out of reach as the current exercises in expectation-setting suggest.

Besides, said Terry Schumaker, who co-chaired both of Bill Clinton’s campaigns here, there’s still “a real incentive to do well here. It would bring the race to closure sooner, rather than putting everyone through a longer primary battle.”

Clinton allies are hoping that “the real Hillary” -— the softer and kinder candidate revealed in recent profiles — will show through here in the final push, like it did in 2008 when she welled up discussing the stakes of her presidential run.

“She showed real emotion and that was really that great New Hampshire moment that we all look for,” added Levesque. “If she can show why she is running and who she is, I think she will beat the expectations here.”