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Trump's campaign says Clinton 'hitting the panic button' in blue states Hillary Clinton retains edge over Donald Trump in election's final sprint
(about 3 hours later)
A bullish Donald Trump campaign claimed momentum is building as it forces Democrats to defend blue states such as Michigan, New Mexico and Minnesota in the closing hours of the presidential election. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are sprinting towards the finish line of the most bitter, divisive and fear-tainted US presidential election of modern times, with polls showing Clinton has the edge.
“They would not be sending President Obama back into [Michigan] on the eve of the election if they were not hitting the panic button,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller told reporters in a conference call. Seeking to become the first female president, the Democrat will end her campaign with a rally in the battleground state of North Carolina at midnight on Monday. Republican candidate Trump will close his at 11pm that night with an event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a state where he is hoping to pull off a huge surprise.
“I remember when they were saying they were going to [red states like] Arizona and Georgia, but they are not going on offense anymore. They are limping toward the finish line.” Around a third of ballots – at least 41 million across 48 states – have been cast in early voting, according to the Associated Press, and the election still appears to be Clinton’s to lose. On Sunday she led Trump 48%-43% in a Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, 44%-40% in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and 45%-42% in a Politico/Morning Consult poll.
The Clinton team argued that its response to Trump’s late push into blue territory was merely precautionary and said their opponent was flailing in the face of terrible early voting numbers in more important swing states. But data suggest she is not as strong in electoral college projections as Barack Obama was at the same stage four years ago. Clinton is not “in a terribly safe position”, leading pollster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “The electoral map is actually less solid for Clinton than it was for Obama four years ago.”
“I think looking at Trump’s schedule versus our schedule is pretty emblematic of how we’re approaching this strategically. Trump is basically going everywhere,” campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters on the Clinton plane. The two candidates have fought an ugly battle to become the 45th president, dogged by controversies ranging from FBI investigation into Clinton’s email use to sexual assault allegations against Trump. Clinton would be the first spouse of a president to reach the White House. Trump, at 70, would be the oldest person to assume the office.
“As far as I’m concerned the more time he spends in Minnesota and Nevada the better … it looks like he’s just trying to go everywhere all at once.” As both candidates and their surrogates set out on a whirlwind final 48 hours on the trail, the wildcard nature of Trump’s candidacy made the map harder to read than usual. Among 10 rallies planned over the last two days were stops in Minnesota, which has not supported a Republican presidential nominee since 1972, and Michigan, which has not gone to the GOP since 1988. Clinton, however, lost both states to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.
Early voting numbers were also disputed. Despite strong evidence that Democrats may have already won states like Nevada on the basis of ballots cast so far, the Trump campaign argued that it was seeing far more Republicans turn out than in 2012 while Democrats faced the reverse problem in key swing states such as North Carolina and Florida. Van Jones, a former adviser to Obama, told CNN’s State of the Union: “Beds are damp. There is a crack in the blue wall and it has to do with trade. This is the ghost of Bernie Sanders.”
Bill Dunn, director of early and absentee voting for the Republican National Committee, claimed Trump had “a slight lead in ballots returned in Colorado”, which Republican internal polling shows is now tied, and was outperforming the Republican 2012 total by 16,000 ballots in Nevada. The Trump campaign claimed “an enormous surge in momentum and enthusiasm” in recent days, citing Minnesota where it said that in less than 24 hours it had 18,000 RSVPs for a event that could hold 5,000 people. It now sees “at least six different paths” to victory, aides said.
But Democrats dismissed the tighter-than-expected races in many battleground states as simply a sign some of wavering Republicans gravitating back to Trump. Dave Bossie, deputy campaign manager, told reporters: “We have expanded the map. We are on offence. We are going to places no one thought we would. It’s an incredibly exciting time for our campaign. Hillary Clinton is on defence and her map is shrinking. We feel we are peaking at the right time as a campaign.”
“This is a natural tightening of the race,” Mook said. “If anything, in the last few days we’ve seen things improve a little bit. These were all battleground states. We built operations in all of them. You build a ground game to win in the margin of error. Clinton has led every poll in Michigan but she, Obama and Bill Clinton were all due to appear there before the vote. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said such major political figures were now playing “follow your leader” in traditional Democratic states.
“This demonstrates the enormous amount of room we have to maneuver in the map,” he said. “If we lost Florida, we don’t actually have to win Pennsylvania. And if we weren’t to win Michigan or Wisconsin, you could make up for all those electoral votes by winning Florida. Donald Trump has to win all of these battleground races.” “We feel very good about the fact that we’re actually setting the landscape here and they’re chasing us around in these blue states,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.
Predictably, the Trump campaign argued the reverse: claiming a widening number of possible paths to its victory as a result of the expanding battleground. “We have seen our prospects improving in Michigan for quite a while now internally and we do see that now reflected in some of the public polling. We also like what we hear on the ground in Michigan ... and we trust the savviness and brilliance of the Clinton campaign.
“We have a clear focus on traditional battleground states, making sure we close strong in places like Florida and North Carolina, but we are also making an aggressive play to try to put some blue states into the red camp,” said Miller. “If they thought Michigan was in the bag, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would not be returning there today or tomorrow.”
“There are a number of states now that could put him over the top – New Hampshire, New Mexico, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania – a number of pathways to 270.” Democrats insisted that was because there is no early voting in the state, so they want to fire up the base. Clinton campaign chair John Podesta told NBC’s Meet the Press: “If we hold on to Nevada, if we hold on to Michigan, then Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president of America.
As well as public polls and early voting data, the two campaigns are nervously eyeing each other’s behaviour. “Most people vote on election day in Michigan, so our schedule has been oriented toward being in the early vote states in the earlier period of time. We feel like we’ve got a lead in Michigan. We want to hold on to it, and we think we can do that.”
“We see Virginia as a place that is breaking late in Trump’s direction,” said Miller. “Look at the fact the Clinton campaign is back on TV having publicly pulled the plug and saying the state was wrapped up. Trump has been widely condemned as a demagogue after calling for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US and promising to build a wall on the Mexican border, branding immigrants as rapists and criminals. A 2005 video recording emerged in which he bragged about groping women, after which a dozen women came forward with claims of sexual assault and harassment. He has been ostracised by key members of his own party.
“Why are they up on TV in New Mexico? in Michigan? If we had said two months ago that President Obama would be heading to Michigan on the eve of the election, I don’t think you’d have bought it. We have the momentum and everything is coming up Trump at the moment.” The final days of his campaign were marked by a raucous incident in a rally in Reno on Saturday night, as Secret Service agents rushed the candidate from the stage. A protester named Austyn Crites who was holding a “Republicans against Trump” sign apparently sparked the confused scene.
Democrats, however, feel confident that their much more sophisticated and better-funded ground game and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are paying dividends. Crites told the Guardian Trump supporters attacked him after he walked to the front of the rally and held up the sign. Eventually, someone shouted “gun”, which led to law enforcement rushing Trump from the stage and briefly detaining Crites.
“Since the start of early voting in late September, we’ve been able to knock on 8.3m doors, and have made 37.4m phone calls, which is more than 45m doors or phone calls in total and more than one million per day throughout the early voting period,” said Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of state campaigns and political engagement, on Friday. Conway said on Sunday: “We’re told that he is a ‘Republican’ who has canvassed for Hillary Clinton and donated money to her campaign.”
By contrast, the Trump campaign claims 3,100 paid staff and 4,500 “trained fellows” have led a GOTV counter-effort that has surpassed Republican performance in 2012 – knocking on 16.3m doors in battleground states and making 12m phone calls since the beginning of early voting. It planned to make 2.5m more over the last weekend. Crites told the Guardian he was a Republican and fiscal conservative but had canvassed “for a few hours” with the Clinton campaign in Nevada, because he wanted to do all he could to prevent a Trump presidency. He described Trump as “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist”.
But the two campaigns are taking very different approaches to their public rallies, with Trump sticking to a familiar formula while Clinton enlists a growing army of big name surrogates and celebrities. Trump’s son, Don Jr, and Dan Scavino, who runs his social media operation, retweeted a message that read: “Hillary ran away from rain today. Trump is back on stage minutes after assassination attempt”. No weapon was found.
“Unless she has a VIP with her, most of these events are pretty flat and pretty boring,” said Miller. “How much can celebrities and surrogates carry her over the finish line?” Although Trump rallies have long been marked by violence and unrest, they had been comparatively peaceful in recent months as the candidate has become increasingly scripted. Rhetorically, Trump has turned his ire on celebrity Clinton supporters Jay Z and Beyoncé.
The Clinton team says the range of voices is successfully showing Americans how unsuited their rival is for office. It will again be deploying its secret weapon in New Hampshire: the parents of the Muslim war hero captain Humayun Khan. “I don’t need Beyoncé and I don’t need Jay Z,” he declared in a Denver rodeo barn. He also criticised Jay Z for lyrics in some of the songs performed at his Friday night concert for Clinton in Cleveland in the battleground state of Ohio.
“Of all the voices that we have heard in the campaign, I don’t believe there is any voice that better embodies the values that we hold as Americans than Mr and Mrs Khan have,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters. “My language is nothing to compared to what Jay Z was doing last night and Beyoncé,” Trump said, adding: “My language is like baby talk.”
Clinton has appeared with other celebrities including Jennifer Lopez, Katy Perry and Jon Bon Jovi. At a get out the vote concert on Saturday night, Perry told roughly 10,000 fans in Philadelphia her parents were lifelong Republicans. “But it’s not about where you come from, it’s about what you grow into,” she said.
Trump also made his first explicit accusations of voter fraud in the 2016 election. Only minutes before the incident that caused secret service agents to rush him from the stage in Reno, he claimed: “It’s being reported certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County were kept open hours and hours beyond closing time to bus and bring Democratic voters in.
“Folks, it’s a rigged system, it’s a rigged system,” he added, to loud boos, before insisting: “We’re going to beat it.”
He was apparently referring to a Las Vegas supermarket where voters, most of whom were Hispanic, stood in line for hours to vote on Friday night. The length of lines meant that the early voting site did not close until 10pm.
Trump’s words echoed allegations by Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican party, who claimed before Trump took the stage: “Last night in Clark County, they kept a poll open until 10 o’clock at night so a certain group can vote … You feel free right now? You think this is a free and easy election?”
The Republican nominee has long made broad, baseless and vague accusations of “large scale voter fraud”. At the final presidential debate, he declined to say whether he would accept the result of the election.
On Sunday his vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence, told Fox News Sunday: “The campaign has made it very clear that a clear outcome, obviously, both sides will accept. But I think both campaigns have also been very clear that in the event of disputed results, they reserve all rights and remedies.”
After the frantic final 48 hours on the trail, both Clinton and Trump will be in New York City on election night, with the Democrats having reportedly booked a firework display and the tycoon billing his planned event at a hotel as a “victory party”.
Conway said: “We did not purchase fireworks because we’re planning for a victory but we’re working really hard toward it and not just assuming it.”