Clinton to step up?

Senate Democrats urge Clinton to step up

As the presidential contender narrows her focus to battlegrounds she needs to win, Reid and Schumer urge her to not forget their push for Senate control.

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Hillary Clinton’s race for the White House is increasingly focused on four of the battleground states: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And for Democrats trying to pick up Senate seats elsewhere, that might mean trouble.

Party operatives in Washington and around the country are wringing their hands over the expected absence of their headliner in the final 60 days of this contest in states such as New Hampshire and Missouri, increasingly nervous that Clinton’s coattails might not be long enough to reach their far-afield races if she’s not spending time and money in those states.

Democrats’ fight for Senate control is dicey enough that both Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his expected successor, Chuck Schumer, have been directly urging the nominee’s campaign to start piling more resources into the battle for control of the chamber. She will, after all, need a Democratic Senate to get anything done come January, Reid has insisted.

In recent conversations with Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, the senators have been making the case that the candidate’s cash-rich political operation — the hub for party money and resources in 2016 — should start playing a greater role to ensure she has at least two years to move legislation through the Senate before Democrats face a brutal 2018 map, according to people familiar with the discussions.

As if to underscore the urgency, Schumer threw $2 million of his own campaign cash into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account this week.

“They’re going to say they’re being strategic for Hillary’s own benefit,” said a senior Democratic operative working on the party’s Senate strategy. “But whether she wins the presidency by 15 electoral votes or 40 electoral votes, if she wins by 15 and has a Democratic Senate or wins by 40 and doesn’t have a Democratic Senate, which is better for her?"

That kind of consternation is spreading.

Democrats need to win four seats to take control of the Senate, and they are currently in a good position to do so: They seem likely to win Republican-held seats in Illinois and Wisconsin and are favored in Indiana, too. Up to eight other Republican seats are in play, with only one Democratic seat — Reid's — currently looking like a toss-up.

The Democratic candidates lead in both New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, but each race is among the tightest in the country. Republicans, meanwhile, lead in Iowa, Missouri, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona, with Ohio Sen. Rob Portman's lead climbing to 10.3 points in the RealClearPolitics average to end the week, as former Gov. Ted Strickland falls further behind. And national Democrats are now threatening to abandon Strickland, given his consistently poor polling, and shift toward more winnable races in North Carolina and Missouri.

But with Donald Trump cutting into Clinton’s lead as the clock ticks toward the first debate, the Democrat’s team has homed in on a swing-state strategy that reduces her face-time in places that would force a detour from their preferred path. And that means her focus now diverges from the party’s push win the Senate.

The four swing states where she’ll likely continue to spend most of her time all have Senate races, but they're hardly all central to Democrats’ fight to win back the chamber.

Pennsylvania’s race between Katie McGinty and Sen. Pat Toomey is close, but North Carolina’s leans away from Deborah Ross, and the Senate Democrats’ campaign wing recently reshuffled its ad plan in the Florida race that’s seen Patrick Murphy try to keep it close. But it scaled back in the Ohio race that’s been getting tougher and tougher for Strickland — as did the Senate Majority PAC.

Neither Missouri nor Arizona, both stretch goals for the Democrats, seems likely to get an influx of support from Clinton’s camp beyond its current level after Brooklyn flirted with expanding operations into those states earlier this summer.

And in New Hampshire — where Clinton appears to be comfortably ahead, not lagging in even a single mainstream public poll this year — Democrats watching one of the closest races in the country warily note that Clinton has visited the state just once since February, introduced at the time by Gov. Maggie Hassan, who is looking to unseat Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

The danger for Democrats is a repeat of 1996, when the top of the Democratic ticket, far ahead, invested relatively little time or money in the state in the final days.

President Bill Clinton won New Hampshire that year. But so did the incumbent Republican senator.

Certainly, Democrats’ quandary is nowhere near as severe as the one facing Republican Senate candidates, many of whom find themselves in the uncomfortable position of sprinting from Trump while trying to build political infrastructures apart from the national Republican party he leads. Sens. Rob Portman, Marco Rubio and Richard Burr, for example, have each tried to individualize their races, but their opponents have the advantage of campaign field teams run through the state parties in conjunction with the Democratic National Committee and — at the top — Clinton’s campaign. And it’s only because of Trump that Democrats see any chance of competing for a Senate seat in a GOP-heavy state like North Carolina, in the first place.

Clinton’s team says it is committed to helping Reid and Schumer win the Senate. In a memo circulated Friday to supporters, the campaign’s states director, Marlon Marshall, detailed Democrats’ advantages over the GOP in one swing state after another.

“Typically, in a presidential election, down-ballot candidates would rely on their presidential nominee’s field infrastructure to also support them. But as of last week, Donald Trump and the Republicans had a total of four offices across Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania,” he wrote, adding that Democrats have 51 coordinated offices in Florida, 30 in North Carolina, and 38 in Pennsylvania.

“As a result, many Republican candidates have had to set up their own infrastructure, which both costs them resources they could allocate to other activities, and means that there are now parallel Republican field structures set up within several states. Contrast this with Democrats who are working out of the exact same offices and off of the same game plan."

But uncertainty about the level of attention key states will get over the next two months from Clinton herself is nonetheless unsettling for Democratic leaders, including those in the states who are constantly reassessing their place in the national pecking order.

That’s in large part because of the way Democrats have centralized some operations of the field program in Brooklyn.

The party is running a ground organizing strategy devised by the presidential campaign but coordinated through the state parties, an arrangement that has Democrats nationwide leaning far more heavily on Clinton’s headquarters than they ever did during either of Barack Obama’s two campaigns. Clinton’s staff even brought state party chairs to its headquarters earlier this summer to walk them through the game plans. When Clinton’s campaign opens local offices, it does so with an eye to which areas are useful on the Senate side, and when its organizers knock on doors or make calls, their scripts include mentions of the Senate candidate in addition to Clinton.

That set-up, wrote Marshall, was put in place “because this election will be harder to win than many people think.”

But while the arrangement allows for a high degree of coordination, it also threatens to leave down-ballot campaigns exposed if the top of the ticket is not fully engaged in the final stages. The question now in such states is the extent of the financial push over the past two months, beyond the field investments that have already been budgeted.

“It’s going to come down to the thousands and thousands of phone calls and door knocks they’re able to make. The support we’re getting from the national level allows us to have a true army of a ground game,” explained Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper, outlining the degree to which in-state races like Strickland’s are reliant on presidential campaign involvement, particularly as they close. “Every mail piece will [say], ‘Clinton-Strickland-the congressional candidate.’”

Operatives involved with both the Clinton campaign’s effort and the national Senate push both note that the state-level infrastructures have been built up for months, prepared to handle such pullbacks or shifts in focus if needed, and that the campaigns have political presences beyond the coordinated organizing efforts.

But that’s not calming the nerves of Senate Democratic leaders, who see a majority in reach.

“The primary objective is to elect Clinton [for] the majority of the coordinated staff,” added one Democratic operative working in a battleground Senate state, underscoring that the Senate is for now a Tier 2 concern.

“The idea is that there are down-ballot benefits.”