Hillary Clinton’s official announcement that she is running for President comes almost ten months to the day that she set out on a book tour to promote “Hard Choices,” a memoir of her four years as Secretary of State. Much has happened since that day, when supporters lined up for hours to get into the Barnes and Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square, where Clinton was signing copies, and some of it will work to her advantage.
With Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to jump into the Democratic primary, Clinton still lacks effective competition, whereas early indications that the Republican contest would turn into a slugfest have been confirmed, with at least half a dozen serious candidates entering, or preparing to enter, the race. In the past year or so, the U.S. economic situation has improved—job growth has picked up (with the exception of last month), and the number of people without health insurance has continued to fall as the effects of the Affordable Care Act have taken hold. Assuming Clinton wins the nomination, both of these things will make it easier for her to defend President Obama’s legacy, and to point to the potential folly, with things improving, of the economy coming under the tutelage of extremist Republicans.
Doubtless, the Republican candidates will subject Clinton to virulent attacks on all manner of subjects, but that could well help her to unite the Democratic Party behind her, and to rally the activists whose support she will need to get out the vote in places such as Florida and Ohio. Moreover, the electoral map remains favorable to the Democrats. If Clinton can carry all of the eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, that have gone blue in every election since her husband’s first victory, in 1992, she will have two hundred and forty-two electoral votes, leaving her within striking distance of victory. As always, the contest is likely to come down a few battleground states, including Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. If Clinton can hold together the “Obama coalition” of young voters, women, and minorities, she has a very good chance of winning. (On the online-betting sites, she is the firm favorite.)
While the external circumstances favor Clinton, the preparations for her campaign have been anything but smooth. Her book tour was marred by a series of mini-gaffes—or that’s what the media perceived them to be, anyway. Earlier this year, it emerged that the Clintons’ charitable foundation, which was recently renamed the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, had taken donations from foreign governments, including repressive ones such as the monarchies that rule Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Then came the news that, during her time at the State Department, Clinton set up and operated a private e-mail system, whose server was subsequently wiped clean at her request. Clinton insisted that she had preserved all of the work-related e-mails on her server, about thirty thousand of them, and forwarded copies of them to Congress, but Republicans on Capitol Hill (and on the campaign trail) are unlikely to let the matter drop.
To be sure, many Democratic strategists insist that the furor over the Clinton Foundation donations and the e-mails are inside-the-Beltway affairs that won’t have any lasting impact on her campaign. But recent opinion polls tell a somewhat different story. In a Gallup poll carried out in early June, 2014, Clinton’s approval rating was fifty-four per cent, and her disapproval rating was forty-three per cent. Now, according to the Huffington Post’s poll-of-polls, her approval rating is forty-eight per cent and her disapproval rating is 46.2 per cent. And two recent polls, from Public Policy Polling and from Fox, show Clinton’s unfavorability rating moving above fifty per cent.
In the aftermath of the e-mails story, the Republicans also appeared to be eating into Clinton’s putative lead over various G.O.P. candidates in a number of battleground states—gaps that, until recently, had been holding steady. A poll from Quinnipiac University, released a few days ago, showed Clinton tied (statistically speaking) in Colorado and in Iowa with seven Republicans: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz. (In Colorado, Walker, Paul, and Rubio were actually leading Clinton, but all of their leads were within the poll’s margin of error.) In Virginia, Clinton still seems to be holding her ground. According to the poll, she leads the Republicans by margins that vary from four points to ten points. But over all, the survey’s message was a worrying one for her campaign: “It is difficult to see Secretary Clinton’s slippage as anything other than a further toll on her image from the furor over her e-mail,” the assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, Peter A. Brown, said.
Of course, it is very early, and the polling data shouldn’t be taken too seriously. In the old days—I’m talking twenty or thirty years ago—a disapproval rating of more than forty per cent was considered a serious handicap to any candidate, but things have changed. In the current, highly polarized environment, Republicans rarely say they approve of Democrats, or vice versa. At the start of 2012, President Obama’s disapproval rating sat at about fifty per cent, according to Gallup, yet, he handily won reëlection. The key to victory isn’t being popular. It’s being less unpopular than the other candidate and getting your supporters to turn out.
With a formidable Democratic campaign apparatus to call on and a bruising Republican primary ahead, Clinton shouldn’t have much trouble raising the alarm about the prospect of the G.O.P. controlling the White House, as well as Congress. But, of course, it will be a tough race. The Republicans are coming off a strong performance in the midterms, and the Democrats have occupied the White House for eight years. As Al Gore discovered, in 2000, winning a third Presidential term for your party isn’t easy, even if you win the popular vote.
Clinton’s first task is to switch the focus away from the e-mails story, which has clearly had an adverse effect on her reputation. Until now, her strategy has been to try to tough it out and move on. But she must be aware that the explanation she provided for setting up her own e-mail operation—it was all a matter of convenience—was a flimsy one, and that it didn’t persuade a lot of people. Referring to the Quinnipiac poll in Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia, Brown said,“In all three of these states, more, and in Colorado many more, registered voters say she is not honest and trustworthy. Voters do think she is a strong leader—a key metric—but unless she can change the honesty perception, running as a competent but dishonest candidate has serious potential problems.”
Having offered up her version of the e-mails story, Clinton could hardly change tack, but she had to do something to arrest the decline in her numbers. Hence, surely, the decision to launch her campaign now, and then, reportedly, to travel to Iowa in the coming days and, later this month, to New Hampshire. That was clearly the right thing to do. Now Clinton needs to demonstrate that, at the age of sixty-seven, after more than twenty years in the public spotlight, she represents a brighter future rather than a fractious past.
An important part of her message, and one that the all-male Republican field may well have trouble countering, is that it’s high time for America to elect a female President. But if Clinton is to follow the examples of Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and Dilma Rousseff, she will also have to project a powerful message about where she wants to lead the country. In policy terms, all indications are that she will run a traditional Democratic campaign, promoting social mobility and emphasizing the interests of the middle class. That’s what Bill Clinton did in 1992; it’s what she did in 2008; and it’s what Obama did in 2012. Given the enduring problems of wage stagnation and rising inequality, it is the appropriate and right agenda.
The task is to make it sound fresh and convincing. I well recall Michael Dukakis campaigning on his version of the “middle-class agenda,” and it wasn’t enough to carry him to victory over George H. W. Bush. But things have changed since 1988, when the full scale of the economic challenge facing ordinary Americans was only beginning to be understood. Today there is hardly a policy-oriented economist in the country who isn’t concerned, in some way, about issues relating to wage stagnation and inequality. To tackle these problems and to promote what is often referred to as “inclusive prosperity,” Clinton can call on a wide range of experts, and a number of detailed proposals that Democratic think tanks, such as the centrist Center for American Progress and the liberal Economic Policy Institute have laid out in recent reports. The ideas range from raising the minimum wage and encouraging the growth of trade unions, to changing the tax code and investing in infrastructure.
Policy wonks, myself included, will be watching closely to see what proposals Clinton adopts and which experts she chooses to rely on. (So far, she’s covering all her bases. A few weeks ago, she spoke at a Center for American Progress event. Last week, she attended a meeting organized by the progressive Roosevelt Institute.) But from the broader perspective of her campaign, the imperative is that she taps into the deep economic insecurity that many Americans feel, and that she is seen to have a credible and sensible agenda for tackling it. And on top of that, of course, she will need to craft a foreign-policy message that addresses Americans’ concerns about the chaos they see enveloping many parts of the world, but that hopefully also goes beyond the hawkish stance that she sometimes adopted in the Senate.
Can she do it? It won’t necessarily be easy and, almost certainly, it won’t be pleasant to watch. Barring something unexpected, the former Secretary of State and First Lady will be engaged in the fight of her life for the next nineteen months. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about her over the years, it’s that she’s a battler.
