Bloomberg News
Hillary Clinton’s lead in national and battleground polls and her forays into Republican strongholds belie deep concerns within her campaign that supporters, whether enthusiastic or marginal, may consider a victory over Donald Trump a foregone conclusion and skip casting a vote.
In the closing days of the race, the Democratic nominee and her strategists are pulling out all their weapons, including celebrity endorsements and almost non-stop campaigning by her most prominent and popular surrogate, President Barack Obama. Clinton’s message on the stump is direct.
“Pay no attention to the polls. Don’t get complacent,” she told voters Tuesday at Broward College in Coconut Creek, Florida, before urging the crowd to head across the street to an early voting station. In Tampa on Wednesday, the message was the same: “No complacency here. Nobody flagging. We’ve got to get everybody out to vote.”
Clinton has been clinging to a consistent lead over Trump since August but the polls have been volatile and the margins varying widely, from 1-point in an Investors Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll released Wednesday to 14 points in an Associated Press/GFK poll released the same day. A Monmouth University poll in New Hampshire showed Clinton’s lead in the battleground state of New Hampshire shrinking over the last month from 9 percentage points to 4. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released hours later gave her a 9-point advantage in the state, up from 7 points a month earlier.
That’s created a sense of both comfort and skittishness within the campaign. While a close fight can energize supporters, a cakewalk risks complacency.
Trump “could still win. So we’re going to stay really vigilant,” said Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “We feel we have the wind at our backs but we are concerned that people think that she’s ahead and that they don’t have to hustle as hard and we want to keep everybody hustling.”
Clinton told reporters aboard her plane that her campaign she’s not taking anything for granted.
“There’s not an ounce of complacency,” Clinton said. “I feel good. But I am really determined that nobody is going to rest or stop or in any way think this election is over before it’s actually over.”
Trump is battling the flip side of complacency, discouragement among his supporters. The Republican presidential nominee said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg Politics Co-Managing Editor Mark Halperin that polls are underestimating his support in several battleground states where he’s currently trailing Clinton. He ticked off a list that included Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New Hampshire and said a final push by his campaign will put him over the top in others.
“We are gonna win,” Trump said.
While Clinton has a focus on winning, Democrats also are looking at the widest possible margin of victory to quash any claims by Trump that the result was skewed by fraud and to repudiate his campaign message. At a fundraiser in San Diego on Monday, Obama said the goal is “to make sure she wins big, to send a clear message about who we are as a people, to send a clear message about what America stands for.”
Although Clinton and Trump are waging national campaigns, their focus is on a narrow band of roughly a dozen states that historically have swung between the two parties in presidential elections. Florida, with 29 electoral votes, is the biggest prize among them, and it’s where Clinton spent Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
A Bloomberg Politics survey in Florida released Wednesday showed Trump holding a 2 percentage point advantage over Clinton, though some other recent polls give Clinton a narrow lead.
“I am very worried. I want people to get out and vote. I don’t want them to sit back,” said Laura Jackson, 66, a Clinton supporter who drove two hours from Republican-heavy Fort Myers to be at Clinton’s Tampa rally. Trump has visited her area a few times in the past month and has drawn big crowds that have only motivated her more to volunteer registering voters and to prod her Clinton-supporting friends to vote. “I’m concerned because the polls are getting tighter,” she said, referring to the Bloomberg Politics poll of Florida. “We’re scared now.”
As she frequently does in Florida, Clinton invoked the name of Democrat Al Gore. Gore won the national popular vote by more than a half million ballots in 2000 but lost the presidency when George W. Bush, after a recount, litigation and a U.S. Supreme Court decision, carried Florida by 537 votes.
“Every vote counts,” she said. “Just ask my friend, former Vice President Al Gore.”
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson said concerns about complacency are best calmed by talking about the potential for getting too comfortable. “That’s why you talk about it,” he said. “And you get your people out.” Clinton, he said, has a “great organization” in Florida that is showing its effectiveness with big early voting totals for Democrats.
Clinton has been pushing early voting heavily in the battleground states as a way to bank votes and overcome what traditionally has been a Republican advantage in Election Day turnout. Her campaign has touted encouraging results in states including Florida and North Carolina, where there’s been an increase in participation in key Democratic counties from 2012 despite a reduction in early vote locations.
Even so, the early vote numbers in other areas such as Ohio and Iowa are lagging from 2012, coinciding with the tight polls in those states, said Michael McDonald, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida who tracks early-voting statistics. In Ohio, where polls show the race essentially tied, there have been 204,000 fewer absentee ballots requested statewide as of Oct. 21 compared with the same point in the 2012 election, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
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