For all of Donald Trump’s problems with various voters, Hillary Clinton may face a greater one: Making a compelling case for her own candidacy that dispels public doubts about her trustworthiness and integrity.
It’s also a question of convincing voters uncomfortable with either candidate not to squander votes on others, diminishing chances of victory in hard-fought states.
Two months from Election Day and three weeks from the first presidential debate, Clinton certainly holds a considerable advantage over Trump in Electoral College powerhouses and pivotal swing states that will determine the outcome.
Yet nationally, and in some swing states, Clinton’s support has eroded since the summer conventions as a growing share of voters adapt an unfavorable view of her amid a continuing stream of reports about her emails and foundation donors. In ABC News’ poll, Clinton has grown almost as unpopular as Trump.
Roughly half of each nominee’s supporters say they’re voting against the opponent more than for their own candidate, Pew Research Center polling finds.
“Everybody all the way around is going to hold their noses and vote, which is unfortunate,’’ says Carl Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, assessing the candidates’ counterattacks. “People almost stop listening at this point. I don’t know where the high ground is, but nobody seems to be on it.”
If Trump’s challenge rests in making a successful pivot toward moderate voters alienated by his harshest rhetoric about immigration and other issues, Clinton’s lies in paving over the problems that have plagued her public image.
As she returns to campaigning, following a month largely devoted to prolific fundraising, she will have to start articulating reasons for placing faith in her — as opposed to simply the assaults on Trump’s character she has been making.
This likely will start with conducting her first news conference since December, a painful excursion through every controversy imaginable, yet one necessary to quell questions about evading the press. Clinton, who has finally taken reporters aboard her campaign plane, started fielding questions from them on Monday.
Unrelenting news reports have heightened public doubts. They chiefly involve the FBI probe of her handling of emails as secretary of state, including the recent release of an investigatory summary suggesting she was unfamiliar with her own agency’s security requirements. They include reports that donors to the Clinton Foundation found ready access to Clinton and others at the State Department.
At the same time, for all the fire in Trump’s campaign rallies, he has started playing a kinder and gentler candidate at times — in appearances with the Mexican president last week and at an African-American church in Detroit where he said: “We’re all brothers and sisters… We must love and support each other.”
Clinton, in an interview with ABC News airing on Good Morning America on Tuesday, criticized Trump’s visit to Mexico, saying, “He came out saying one thing and the Mexican president contradicted him almost immediately… So he did choke.” For her part, choking back a cough as she addressed an Ohio audience on Labor Day, Clinton joked: “Every time I think about Donald Trump, I get allergic.”
Still, it’s raucous rallies where the Republican keeps his base of support in line, stumping this week in states on which the contest will turn: Cleveland on Labor Day, Virginia Beach and Greenville, N.C., on Tuesday, Pensacola, Florida, Friday — finding affirmation in the support of sizable crowds still lacking in polls.
These are states where Clinton’s apparent advantage has softened. In Ohio, Clinton holds an average lead of 3.2 points in a four-way matchup, her margin narrowing over the past month. In Florida, Clinton is up 3.6, trimmed from 5-9 point post-convention leads. North Carolina: 0.3, several points narrower than early August. Virginia: 7.7 — down from double-digit leads after the conventions.
In the case Clinton is making against Trump in campaign TV ads — that he lacks the temperament to hold the nuclear codes — Clinton holds a comfortable edge. She outpaces Trump by more than two-to-one on questions about the personality and temperament it takes to serve as president, in NBC News’ polling.
Yet on the question of honesty and trustworthiness, Clinton scores 11 percent, Trump 16. Trump running mate Mike Pence is calling Clinton “the most dishonest candidate running for president of the United States since Richard Nixon.”
Character assaults may not be enough to secure victory for the former first lady and senator or billionaire political neophyte who eliminated his own party’s field. Only one in five voters surveyed say either candidate shares their own values.
Peter Hart, a longtime pollster for the Wall Street Journal and Democratic candidates who conducts focus groups for the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, came away from his latest session with voters in Milwaukee with a clear picture of Clinton’s biggest challenge.
“The big picture is that Hillary Clinton is ahead among these voters because she is perceived as ‘the safer choice,’ but they just do not trust her,” Hart wrote in an analysis for the Journal’s Washington Wire. “This is important because she will not get any benefit of the doubt if something takes a wrong turn.”
“Donald Trump is unacceptable to most voters in the focus group and throughout the country,” Hart wrote. “He remains a ‘risk candidate’… But they need to know that they can ‘live with’ Hillary Clinton for the next four years. For now, the hurdle for these voters is to feel reassured that they can trust her and that she will identify with them and their day-to-day challenges.”
Following a convention boost, Clinton’s unpopularity reached “a new high” in ABC News polling at the end of August: 59 percent of registered voters viewing her unfavorably, virtually equal to the 60 percent holding a dim view of Trump.
Pollster Gary Langer reported for ABC that this “follows renewed focus on her use of a private email server and alleged conflicts of interest regarding her connections to the Clinton Foundation while she served as secretary of state.” It has registered among core supporters — college graduates, Hispanics and liberals. Even among women, Clinton’s greatest electoral asset, 54 percent view her unfavorably, 43 percent positively— the first time this year women’s views have tilted against her.
As Clinton’s support has softened, Trump’s has held fairly steady — the choice of about 38 percent of voters in most recent public surveys about a four-way race with Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Clinton holds an average 3.4 percent edge over Trump in the polls RealClearPolitics monitors.
In CNN’s “Poll of Polls,” Clinton’s edge over Trump has been cut in half since the conventions, Clinton holding an average of 42 percent support to Trump’s 37 in five national surveys between Aug. 9 and 30.
It’s not so much Trump “making headway” as Clinton “facing headwinds,” says Rick Tyler, a Republican campaign consultant and MSNBC commentator.
Alternative candidates are holding firm in these surveys. Among Republican leaders who have renounced Trump, few have said they’ll vote for Clinton — instead considering a third-party option or no vote for president. Polls show that Johnson, on the ballot in every state, and Stein, on ballots in most states, could siphon more than 10 percent of the vote from Clinton or Trump, potentially denying one victory in some closely contested swing states.
Asked about a third voting option, it is Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont who railed against Clinton in the Democratic primaries, who makes a case for Clinton more concisely and cogently than the candidate herself sometimes.
“Either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to become president of the United States,’’ Sanders said on NBC News’ Meet the Press. Heading out to campaign for Clinton in New Hampshire on Labor Day, he reeled off issues in her favor: Raising the minimum wage, tuition-free public college, climate change, rebuilding infrastructure, immigration, criminal justice.
“This is not about Trump, it’s not about Clinton, it is about the American people,’’ Sanders said. “And on all of those issues… to my mind, Hillary Clinton is far and away the superior candidate.”
In the one national survey in which Clinton and Trump have taken turns at narrow leads since the conventions, the latest by the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California finds Trump ahead by two points. This is different from other polls in that it tracks a sample of 3,000 voters over time, daily surveying 400— and attempts to weight the sample based on how people say they voted in 2012.
Yet this survey yields one notably wide margin. Regardless of whom people plan to vote for, who do they expect to win? 55 percent say Clinton, 40 percent Trump.
