A dogfight

Clinton’s new reality: A dogfight with Trump

A race against an unconventional foe is looking like a conventional, 2012-style battle.

By Annie Karni

Staring at national polls showing Hillary Clinton in a statistical dead heat with Donald Trump, Democrats are settling into a new reality: a race against the most untraditional political foe is shaping up to be a conventional, 2012-style battle.

With Republican voters beginning to fall in line behind their presumptive nominee, the election is expected to be tight and hard fought in the battleground states the same way it was four years ago when a more formulaic candidate, Mitt Romney, was the GOP nominee — with key counties won or lost based on hyper-local organizing efforts mimicking precinct fights in local races.

Trump’s unorthodox campaign style, marked by personal attacks and contradictory positions, has many Democratic voters believing the match-up against Clinton will be something extraordinary, the likes of which the country has never seen before. That may be true in terms of the nature of the debate, but the recent set of polls foreshadow a more ordinary election that breaks along familiar party lines just like it did between Romney and President Obama.

“It's not going to be some bizarre election in which one of them pulls out ahead, stays ahead, and does so by mobilizing their base,” said Jonathan Cowan, a former Clinton White House official and president of the moderate think tank Third Way.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from last week showed Clinton and Trump virtually tied, with Clinton leading by three points. And a recent CBS News/New York Times poll had Clinton beating Trump 47 to 41 percent — a narrowing of her 10-point lead from last month.

“The reality is there’s a very strong demographic argument for a repeat of 2012,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. “It will be a very irregular campaign, but it may have a similar result.”

Part of the tightening is due to an expected bump that occurs once a candidate clears the field, as Trump has done. “Barring any things like indictments, this is probably one of the better times for Donald Trump and worst times for Hillary Clinton in terms of the context of where the campaign is, if you put it on a timeline,” Miringoff said, noting that Clinton remains locked in a protracted primary battle with Bernie Sanders. “With Trump, anything that resembles party unity is a 2016 version of a convention bounce. It’s a really good time for him.”

Clinton, he said, should see a similar bounce after she reaches the necessary delegate threshold and defeats Sanders.

“This is much more likely to be the 2012 model than the 2008 model,” Cowan said. “Modern presidential race are defined by closeness and volatility — and we’re going to see both of those repeatedly until the very end.”

The 2008 model, when Barack Obama started to pull ahead of John McCain after the financial crisis and never let go of his lead, was the exception to the rule, Cowan noted.

But for Democrats, the Trump bump in the polls is a discomfiting feeling, even if it can be explained. “I take the Trump threat very, very seriously,” said longtime Clinton ally Paul Begala. “While media have covered the reluctance of elites like Speaker Ryan to get on board, the rest of the party has done so with remarkable speed. Meanwhile, Hillary has a lot of work to do to consolidate Democrats.”

Clinton officials said they expect Trump to be a much weaker candidate than Romney was four years ago because of major vulnerabilities among moderate voters who are not broken out in the recent national polls. That self-defined category of voters, they contend, is more likely to be repelled by Trump than average Republicans. One Clinton official quoted a Washington Post/ABC poll that showed 58 percent of all respondents believe Trump was unqualified to be president.

"We know this election will be tight, just as most every general election is,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. “But Donald Trump is no ordinary Republican nominee. He is viewed as unqualified to serve as president in the eyes of huge swaths of the electorate, and for good reason.”

Several Democratic strategists said Clinton will have to win at least 55 percent of moderates, in addition to turning out her base, to win the election. “Because both of the [likely] nominees are creating strong partisan reactions,” Cowan said, “this race is going to see an even higher premium of the middle of the electorate — moderates and independents. Partisans are going to come home on both sides. The question is, what do the moderates do?”

For now, Clinton allies are eager to avoid complacency by hammering home the notion that Trump is no ordinary threat. “We can’t let Donald Trump be normalized,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a rally in Commerce while introducing Clinton at a rally Tuesday. “Nothing about him is normal.”

In her remarks here, Clinton unveiled a new hit on Trump: knocking him for cheering for the failure of the housing market ahead of the 2008 crash. “Donald Trump said, I sort of hope that happens,” Clinton said. “He actually said he was hoping for the crash that caused hardworking families in California and across America to lose their homes, all because he thought he could take advantage of it to make some money for himself.”

The housing market crash was the latest in a series of attack lines the Clinton campaign appears to be testing out to see what resonates — the campaign needs a contrast message that will do double duty helping to lock up the 90 percent of Democrats who allies believe will eventually vote for Clinton, as well as swing voters in battleground states.

“The new national polls are depressing, but not a cause for a mass freak out,” said Democratic strategist Lis Smith, a former Martin O’Malley operative who ran Obama’s 2012 rapid response operation against Romney. “The main lessons that Democrats can draw from the polls right now is not to be overconfident — after Trump became the presumptive nominee, too many Democrats were prematurely spiking the football and declaring victory. Talk of a 1964 landslide was premature, to say the least.”

But “given how deeply unpopular Secretary Clinton is, it will not be enough for her to just run as the anti-Trump,” Smith added, noting that Clinton will need to make a strong, affirmative case to voters for why she should be president. “A race to the bottom will not re-engage the Obama coalition."