Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump: 6 weeks, 3 tasks to be the next president
The race for the White House is finally set: Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump.
Clinton has joined Trump in clinching a majority of delegates at the national conventions in July — making American history as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major party. By some measures, the controversial former secretary of State and the blustery billionaire businessman have electoral flaws that might prove fatal in a typical political year.
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Clinton and Trump have negative ratings worse than any previous nominees. Both face legal controversies that are all but certain to dog them through the fall campaign. The election of either would require breaking ground, as the first female president or the first president to lack governmental or military experience.
Yet the prospects for each are bolstered by the vulnerabilities of the other. Besides, this has hardly been a typical political year. The six weeks from the effective end of the primary campaign Tuesday to the start of the summer conventions is when more voters begin to pay attention and impressions of the candidates are set.
Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide
Here are three big tasks Clinton and Trump each need to accomplish as they prepare to face off in the fall.
Donald Trump
1. Tone it down.
"Stop the crazy," advises former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele.
Trump's propensity for provocative statements — build a wall at the Mexican border, temporarily ban Muslim immigrants, countenance the spread of nuclear weapons — helped him create a core of supporters who see him as a straight talker and strong leader not constrained by political correctness. But in recent weeks, his declarations have alarmed even some natural allies, especially his attack on an Indiana-born federal judge he says can't be trusted to preside over a lawsuit against Trump University because of his Mexican heritage. Tuesday afternoon, Trump issued a statement saying his views had been misconstrued.
That was after his comments sparked public pushback from senior Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, 48 hours after he had endorsed Trump, and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been defending him to critics. "It's a paradox," says Republican consultant John Brabender, a strategist for Rick Santorum's presidential campaign. "What got him where he is in the primaries — that's what makes him vulnerable in a general election."
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To win in November, Trump needs to expand the base of support he built in the primaries to include more voters from demographic groups that hold overwhelmingly negative views of him, among them Latinos, women and young people.
Instead, since clearing the GOP field and becoming the presumptive nominee, Trump's rhetoric has focused attention on questions about his temperament rather than news that might have dented Clinton, including a disappointing jobs report Friday and the findings of the State Department watchdog looking into her use of a private email server as secretary of State.
2. Build an infrastructure.
Even as he launches a nationwide race that will involve organizations in 50 states, Trump is surrounded by a campaign staff that is smaller than those fielded by some candidates for city hall.
"They've got to hire a communications director; they've got to get a rapid-response; they've got to get the nuts and bolts of campaigning," says GOP consultant John Feehery, a former spokesman for Republican House leaders. GOP strategist Alex Conant, a top aide in Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential bid, agrees. "Trump's narrow pathway to victory requires turning out lots of voters who normally don't vote," Conant says. "You need a well-oiled organization to do that."
Clinton has more than a dozen senior staffers in her campaign's communication shop alone; Trump relies largely on spokeswoman Hope Hicks. Clinton has deployed an army of surrogate speakers to attack her opponent and reinforce her message on cable TV and talk radio.
Trump has ... well, Trump.
"I am getting bad marks from certain pundits because I have a small campaign staff," Trump countered Monday in a tweet he posted on his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account — a tactic which admittedly reaches an enormous audience of 8.7 million followers. (@HillaryClinton has 6.6 million.) "But small is good, flexible, save money and number one!"
3. Get beyond the slogans.
As he heads into the general election and the fall debates, Trump faces more pressure to outline precisely what he would do as president. His official campaign website, www.donaldjtrump.com, offers short takes on just seven positions he's taken, from "pay for the wall" to Second Amendment rights. The list doesn't address such fundamental issues as education, job creation, entitlement programs and national security.
In contrast, Clinton's official website, www.hillaryclinton.com, has a tab that lists issues alphabetically, from A ("Alzheimer's cure possible by 2025") to W ("Workforce and skills"). They include position papers and bullet-point plans on everything from early childhood education to animal protection to climate change.
During the primaries, the lack of detailed policy positions never emerged as a significant problem for Trump, but they are considered a given in a general-election campaign. The fact that Trump hasn't detailed his policies fuels concerns among GOP conservatives about exactly what views he holds. And it contributes to a sense that he might shift his position on an issue any time he fields a question about it.
"This is a phase of the campaign where voters begin to look at Trump as a potential president, not just a celebrity and businessman," Conant says. "He needs to move quickly to define what a Trump presidency would look like. Otherwise his opponents or critics will do it for him."
Hillary Clinton
1. Warm it up.
After Democratic pollster Peter Hart conducted focus groups in Ohio last December on behalf of the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, he concluded Hillary Clinton's problem was not only a "glass ceiling" — the breakthrough for a female candidate — but "a glass curtain." He wrote afterward, "Many feel they can see and hear her, but they do not think they can relate to or touch her. In their words, she is remote and distant."
That's a significant liability for a presidential contender, and one the Clinton campaign has struggled to remedy. In recent months, Clinton has reveled in the joys of being a grandmother, appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to spotlight a lighter side and aired a TV ad that shows her consoling a 10-year-old girl whose parents were in the country illegally.
Even so, her unfavorable ratings have continued to sour, from 42% in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll in April 2015, when she announced her candidacy, to 56% a year later. That's higher than any presidential nominee in history — except, that is, for Trump, who was at 65% in the April survey.
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"For those of us who know Hillary, this is really hard," says former Colorado congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, who made her own historic bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. Schroeder calls Clinton "marvelous and friendly" but acknowledges she is seen by some as "calculating, ambitious and icy-cold," a policy wonk rather than a human being. "I would love to see her talking with real people," Schroeder says, "somehow to show the humanity side of her."
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says Clinton should appear in smaller settings and reveal more personal details about herself, such as her religious faith and her longtime involvement on behalf of children. "Everybody thinks they know her completely; she's an iconic candidate," Lake says. "So you have to be very aggressive about getting that information out."
2. Woo Millennials.
The key task for Clinton in uniting the Democratic Party isn't so much to win Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' embrace, although that would be helpful, and the sooner the better. What's crucial is winning the support and, ideally, enthusiasm from the rising generation of Millennials who overwhelmingly have backed her Democratic rival.
In the most recent USA TODAY/Rock the Vote poll of voters under 35, Sanders led Clinton by double digits, 54%-37%. Among Sanders' supporters, two-thirds said they would vote for Clinton in a general election, but nearly one in 10 said they would back Trump and two in 10 said they would stay home.
Poll shows that Millennials would flock to Clinton against Trump
For Millennials and other voters, Clinton "has to present her own economic vision — not a series of plans," says Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and former White House communication director for Obama.
"Bernie, who is very aspirational, has struck a chord with young people who don't really see, in my opinion, that the road getting where he wants to go is not there," California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Clinton supporter, said in an interview. "When we have this one-on-one race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, that will bring the vast majority of Bernie people to Hillary. It's not pretty. It never is. But I believe it will happen."
3. Take on Trump.
Clinton had left the toughest attacks on Trump to others — until last Thursday, when she delivered a caustic speech on foreign policy that questioned his ability to serve as commander in chief and suggested he might be unbalanced. "I'll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants," she said.
The San Diego speech cheered Democrats who had worried about the vigor of her campaign message and her ability to respond to an unpredictable opponent.
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"Between now and the convention is really a critical time," says former Democratic national chairman Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont and one-time presidential hopeful — a time when she will "establish who she is going to be" in the race. Against Trump, he said, "you have to smack him because he's a bully, and then you have to turn to substance because he doesn't have any."
"She must use Trump's record and rhetoric to portray him as unacceptably risky to occupy the Oval Office," says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adviser to Bill Clinton in his presidential campaign and on his White House staff. "She must bet that less than a majority of Americans are angry enough to send someone to Washington to blow the place up — details to come. There's a difference between change and a leap into the unknown. Most Americans want the former, not the latter."
Speaking of leaps: In six or seven weeks, the candidates will announce their running mates, deliver their convention speeches — and race into the fall campaign.