Hillary Clinton to take women's issues out of silo

Hillary Clinton plans to launch a new initiative this weekend as she seeks to weave women’s issues into every facet of her campaign instead of using them in a separate silo as she did in her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.

On Saturday, the Democratic front-runner will launch "Women for Hillary’’ with a two-week effort to enlist the support of female voters that will include house parties, organizing events and trips by the candidate and her surrogates to early voting states, campaign officials told USA TODAY. She’s also aiming to make a personal connection with women by using a marketing campaign that will offer regular subscriptions for home deliveries of some of Clinton’s favorite household items and branded products, according to Jesse Ferguson, the campaign’s spokesman.

Clinton is also hoping to shift attention away from a crush of stories about her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of State and toward policies she thinks will energize the demographic most critical to her White House bid. Women make up a higher percentage of the electorate, at 53%, than men do.

The rollout coincides with the 20th anniversary of the former first lady’s 1995 speech to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, in which she proclaimed “women’s rights are human rights.’’

Just as that address "pushed the envelope’’ to elevate women’s issues globally, her 2016 campaign is "being more intentionally overt about these issues," said Lissa Muscatine, Clinton’s chief speechwriter at the time. "That is pushing the envelope at least in the context of a political campaign,’’ she said. "Her whole point is, we can’t marginalize anybody and expect us all to get ahead.’’

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Unlike previous presidential campaigns, officials say, Clinton will take women’s issues out of their own silo. For instance, Clinton will make expanding paid leave for new mothers part of her economic platform by emphasizing its cost to families. And she’ll carry over the global women’s agenda she began at the State Department to incorporate women’s rights into her foreign policy platform.

When she stands alongside New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in Portsmouth, N.H., on Saturday, to receive her endorsement, Clinton will also be trying to stunt the momentum Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has built in the nation’s first primary state, where polls now show him with the edge.

It’s an effort to demonstrate a female tour de force behind the Democratic front-runner after a summer dominated by negative headlines about her email server. House parties are planned on Sept. 16, the day Republicans hold their second primary debate.

A new marketing initiative called "Thx Box," a take on an online makeup subscription called BirchBox, will offer regular home delivery of assorted merchandise. Supporters will also receive a Bitmoji of a pink pantsuit they can impose onto their own avatar.

To become the nation’s first female president, Clinton needs strong levels of support from all women, though her immediate challenge may be to improve her standing among white women. Older, working-class white women, many of whom remember the battle for an Equal Rights Amendment, have long formed the backbone of her base of support. However, in an August Quinnipiac poll, Clinton's favorability among white women was 35%, 9 points lower than with woman as a whole and a 10-point drop from April when she launched her campaign.

However, in matchups with her potential Republican opponents, she polled at the same level among white women as President Obama fared in 2012 during his successful re-election campaign.

"Some of these women may have defected because of the effect of very negative media coverage’’ over her email use, said Dianne Bystrom, director of a women and politics program at Iowa State University.

There’s also another factor at play, based on 2008 post-mortem analyses, she said. "White women voters are harder on women candidates and hold them to higher expectations than male candidates." Just as black voters were initially hesitant to support Obama, "we don’t want the first woman president to be a failure,’’ said Bystrom.

Obama relied on a strong showing among women in the past two election cycles. Clinton hopes to match the 55% of female voters who supported Obama in 2012.

The surrogates who will travel to early voting states over the next two weeks include Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney and California Sen. Barbara Boxer. Organizing events on Sept. 10 in Columbus, Ohio, and Milwaukee show she’s also looking beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.

The lawmakers will emphasize Clinton’s career both as a first lady who worked to increase funding for child care and the Family and Medical Leave Act and as a U.S. senator from New York who pushed for emergency contraception and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Follow @HeidiPrzybyla on Twitter.