Hillary Clinton’s increasingly confident campaign has warned against complacency, as new poll numbers suggested Donald Trump may drag Republicans into a rout in just over two weeks time.
In the final days after their televised debates, the candidates have adopted starkly different tactics to reach the more than 200 million Americans who have registered to vote in the election.
While Trump has doubled down with raucous swing state rallies that some have compared to a rock music tour, Clinton is spending heavily on TV advertising and local organising, with an eye toward states in once safely Republican territory.
The strategy could take the candidate well past the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House, and marks a turn to helping other Democrats win back control of Congress.
Speaking at a rally in Orlando, Florida on Sunday night, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine said data from early voting states suggested Clinton was headed toward a “very big and historic win” on 8 November.
However, Clinton campaign aides insisted they had not discounted the risk that Trump could benefit from an unpredictable 2016 electorate, especially in swing states like Ohio where polling remains tight.
“These battleground states are called that for a reason,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, told CNN on Sunday. “They are going to be incredibly close. We don’t want to get ahead of our skis here. We are just as focused on Ohio, Iowa, Florida as we have ever been.”
Trump advisers acknowledge they are facing an uphill battle, but maintain the country’s anti-establishment mood will work in their favour in the final few days.
“We are behind,” campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told NBC. “She has some advantages, like $66m in ad buys just in the month of September. She has a former president, happens to be her husband, campaigning for her, and she’s seen as the incumbent.”
Conway argued that the electoral map, reshaped by Trump, would benefit the businessman. “Our advantage going in when we’re behind one, three, four points in some of these swing states that Mitt Romney lost to President Obama,” she said, “is that Donald Trump is just going to continue to take the case directly to the people.
“He doesn’t expect to be able to cut through the noise and the way we’re treated by some, so he’s taking the case. He’s going to visit all of these swing states many times and we feel that with Hillary Clinton under 50% in some of these places, even though she has run a very traditional and expensive campaign, that we have a shot of getting those undecided voters.”
Eric Trump, the nominee’s son, echoed these sentiments but rejected the idea that his father was playing to his base of support. ABC host George Stephanopoulos pressed the case, asking whether the businessman might be “in a bubble of your own support”. Trump answered: “No, I don’t – I don’t think so at all.”
Some Republicans are sceptical Trump can find a way to win. Karl Rove, who masterminded George W Bush’s narrow election victories over Al Gore and John Kerry, was sceptical on Sunday that there was enough time left.
“I don’t see it happening,” he told Fox News. “Maybe it could, but I doubt, in the just over two weeks we’ve got left and conducting the kind of campaign he is conducting, that he is going to be able to swing one out of every 10 voters.”
The Clinton campaign remains confident that it can spare resources on punishing the Republican party for standing with Trump, who has repeatedly broken the norms of American politics and energised once shunned leaders, such as former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke.
“I think in general you’re going to hear her do more of what she did [in Pennsylvania] in terms of trying to raise the stakes of the down-ballot races,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, told the Guardian after the secretary spent a day supporting the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Kate McGinty.
Fallon said the Clinton campaign wanted to “extend an open hand” to traditionally Republican voters even as it targets the “different strain” within the party that continues to support Trump, despite his offensive remarks about women, immigrants and minorities.
Although many Senate veterans, including John McCain and Kelly Ayotte, have rescinded their endorsements of Trump, he has retained his vociferous base and the muted support of House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Fallon said such leaders “should be held accountable in two and a half weeks, for having played a role in Trump’s rise and for standing by him even after he’s gone around and offended people and shown himself to be completely temperamentally unfit”.
The aide said Clinton’s campaign would continue to court “reasonable Republicans and independents” who might be willing to defect across party lines.
Trump Jr also told ABC that his father would “100%” accept the results of the election if it was fair.
“I think what my father is saying is, ‘I want a fair election,’” Eric Trump said on ABC’s This Week. “If it’s a fair outcome, he will absolutely accept it. There’s no question about that.”
(TheGuardian US )
