For Hillary Clinton, struggle to change public perception persists
Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in three debates. She leads in many preference polls of the most competitive states. Barring a significant shift in the next two weeks, she is in a strong position to become the first woman elected U.S. president. But Clinton will end the campaign still struggling to change the minds of millions of voters who don’t think well of her, a glaring liability should the Democratic nominee move on to the White House. While many see her as better prepared to be commander in chief than Trump, she is consistently viewed unfavorably by more than half of the country. Most voters also consider her dishonest. Clinton’s advisers have spent months trying to erase that perception. They’ve set up small events where she had more intimate conversations with voters. They’ve tested a seemingly endless stream of messages aimed at assuring the public that the former secretary of state was in the race to do more than fulfill her own political ambitions. As Clinton starts making her closing argument to voters, her team appears to have come to terms that the mission remains unfulfilled. “Honest and trustworthy has become our most talked about metric because it’s not great,” said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director. “But we’ve never thought it’s the metric people make a decision on.” If Clinton wins, that theory may be proven true. Just 36 percent of voters believe Clinton is honest and trustworthy, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. That’s compared with about 60 percent who believe she has the qualifications and temperament to be commander in chief. The public’s perception of Clinton has bounced up and down throughout her time in public life. Her favorability rating fell below 50 percent at times during her years as first lady, but rose to its high water mark then and while she was as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Democrats blame some of the current negative personal perceptions of Clinton on the hard-charging tactics she’s used to try to discredit Trump, though they believe her sustained assault on Trump’s character and temperament has been crucial. Party operatives also say Trump’s personal attacks on Clinton have made it all but impossible for more positive messages to break through. He’s called her a “liar,” a “nasty woman” and pledged to put her in jail. “When you’re under relentless assault from a reality TV star, it’s hard to come out of that with anybody feeling good about anyone,” said Bill Burton, a former Obama aide. Still, Clinton’s advisers acknowledge that some of her troubles have been of her own making, including her penchant for privacy. She’s spent nearly the entire campaign struggling to explain why she used a private email server in the basement of her home while she led the State Department. She hid a pneumonia diagnosis this fall from nearly all of her senior staff, then left the public unaware of her condition and whereabouts for 90 minutes after the illness caused her to rush out of a public event in New York. “She is a politician that does not seek to be the center of attention and is inherently more private than most politicians, certainly presidential candidates,” Palmieri said. “That doesn’t always serve you great in a campaign for president.” Clinton frequently shoots down questions about the public’s negative perceptions by saying she’s viewed more positively when she’s doing a job rather than running for one. There’s some evidence to back that up. When she ran for re-election to the Senate from New York in 2006, she won with 67 percent of the vote, a big jump from the 55 percent share from her first race in 2000. Her approval rating when she left the State Department, where her job kept her out of day-to-day politics, sat at an enviable 65 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. But if Clinton is elected president, she won’t have the luxury she had as secretary of state to stay away from the political fray — with Republicans in Washington in the opposition, and possibly Trump, too. The businessman keeps flirting with the idea he could contest the election results if he loses. There are also persistent rumors that, if he loses, he might try to harness the enthusiasm of his millions of supporters into some type of media venture. “The notion that Trump is going to go quietly into the night and wish her Godspeed is highly unlikely,” said David Axelrod, another former Obama adviser. “She’s going to have to contend with that and whatever it is he chooses to make his vehicle.” Clinton has begun acknowledging the challenge that could await her in the White House, if she wins, centering her closing argument to voters on a call for unity after a bitter campaign. “My name may be on the ballot, but the question really is who are we as a country, what are our values, what kind of a future do we want to create together,” she said Friday at a rally in Ohio. Some Democrats see the transition — the two-month-plus stretch between the Nov. 8 election and the Jan. 20 inauguration — as a crucial opportunity for her to signal, if she wins, that a Clinton White House would be different from a Clinton campaign. In a nod to bipartisanship, she could nominate a Republican for her Cabinet. Clinton could start moving on some of her more broadly popular policy proposals as a way of boosting her appeal, assuming no crisis demands immediate action. Still, Axelrod said changing the public’s view of Clinton will be a “long-term project.” “There’s no silver bullet to turn around years of wear and tear on her image,” he said. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Who is Evan McMullin, third-party candidate surging in Utah
Two months after he jumped into the presidential race as a political unknown on the fringe, independent candidate Evan McMullin is surging in the polls in Utah and drawing large crowds at rallies as he becomes the conduit for conservative voters fed up with Republican Donald Trump‘s crudeness and antics. The Republican stronghold of Utah is suddenly a toss-up state amid widespread rejection of Trump, with polls showing McMullin closing in on the Republican nominee and Democrat Hillary Clinton. It means that Utah may do what seemed unthinkable: Elect a non-Republican presidential candidate for the first time since 1964. Though McMullin is only on the ballot in 11 states, there’s even talk of the 40-year-old becoming president in a wild, exceedingly unlikely scenario in which neither Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton gets enough electoral votes and Congress is left to decide. McMullin’s stunning ascent into relevancy has everyone asking: Who is this guy? Born in Provo, Utah – the heartland of Mormon country – McMullin spent his childhood in a rural area of Washington outside Seattle. He did a two-year Mormon mission in Brazil and then returned to Utah to earn a degree in international law and diplomacy at the Mormon church-owned Brigham Young University. He spent 11 years in the CIA doing counter terrorism work before leaving the agency to get a master’s in business administration from the Wharton School of Business and have a brief stint in investment banking. He later became a national security adviser for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He was working as the chief policy director for U.S. House Republicans as he watched with amazement as Trump won the GOP nomination and no other conservative jumped in the race. By late summer, he realized he would have to run to give conservative voters an alternative to Trump and Clinton. Despite knowing he would endure ridicule and questions about his motives, McMullin went for it. McMullin is hopeful he can win Utah and make a dent in neighboring Idaho and Wyoming. But even if he doesn’t win any state, he said he’s already accomplished part of what he set out to do. “We believe it’s time in this country for a new conservative movement,” McMullin said. “That would be a conservative movement that’s welcoming to people of all races and religions… It’s a conservatism that is compassionate and wants to help people and understands people’s struggles and help them through these struggles.” McMullin is scheduled to host a rally Friday night in a Salt Lake City suburb before making campaign stops in Idaho and Colorado in the coming days. Damon Cann was a roommate of McMullin’s for three months in 1999 when they lived together at BYU housing in Virginia. Cann, now a Utah State University political scientist, remembers McMullin being an ambitious young man with a high motor who was very excited about starting his career in the CIA, taking very seriously all the agency rules. He even insisted on reporting an encounter with foreigners from across the hall who gave them cookies, Cann remembers. Handicapping this year’s race, Cann said McMullin has seized the opportunity created by the unpopularity of Trump and Clinton by persuading voters he’s a better option than Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, whose policies don’t quite jibe with Utah’s culture. That includes being pro-abortion rights and accepting the legalization of gay marriage. His choice of a woman as his running mate, Republican campaign strategist Mindy Finn, is just one part of his campaign that has endeared him to Utah voters, especially young Mormons, Cann said. “People tend to have a higher level of social trust for people who are in the same group,” Cann said. “LDS people find Evan McMullin to be trustworthy on the account he shares their religious identification.” McMullin downplays the role his religion is playing in his ascent. “It’s about principles. They’re not only Mormon principles, they are the principles of millions of Americans,” McMullin said. “I am the only true conservative in this race.” Matthew Burbank, an associate professor of political science at the University of Utah, predicts Trump will narrowly win the state, making McMullin mainly an interesting historical footnote similar to Ross Perot‘s 1992 showing in Utah when he finished second to George H.W. Bush but ahead of Bill Clinton. But he’s among those impressed by how well McMullin has maneuvered this year’s bizarre political landscape to earn widespread attention. McMullin’s strategy to stake out general, conservative ideas seems to be working because most voters aren’t looking for detailed plans about what he would do as president because they know that’s not realistic. “He’s primarily a symbolic conservative,” Burbank said. “As long as he holds that position, some Utah voters will look at that and say, ‘I’d rather vote for him.’” Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Conservative presidential candidate Evan McMullin fails to make Alabama ballot
Evan McMullin will not be on the ballot in Alabama. POLITICO reports the newly announced conservative independent presidential candidate failed to submit required signatures for a spot on Alabama’s general election ballot The deadline for independent candidate filing, writes Caroline Kelly, was 5 p.m. Thursday, as verified by the Alabama secretary of state’s office. “We haven’t gotten any, none at all,” said Deputy Chief of Staff John Bennett of McMullin signatures. Bennett confirmed the office did receive signatures for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Rocky de la Fuente, running on the Reform Party ticket. Signatures of registered Alabama voters still need verification before the final results are announced, Bennett told POLITICO. Although McMullin will be on both the Colorado and Utah ballots, the former CIA employee failed to make nearly one-third of the 24 states with remaining deadlines. Thursday was also the deadline for Tennessee, which required 250 signatures, but Secretary of State Director of Communications Adam Ghassemi could not confirm to POLITICO that McMullin, who had announced his candidacy last week, had submitted any signatures. Filing deadlines are Friday for Iowa and Louisiana.
