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Clinton Campaign Makes a Late Push to Win Over Male Voters
Emails Warrant No New Action Against Hillary Clinton, F.B.I. Director Says
(35 minutes later)
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is making a last-minute appeal asking voters to embrace the idea of having a woman as president, with Mrs. Clinton’s leading allies exhorting men to discard any reservations they may have about Mrs. Clinton because of her gender.
The F.B.I. informed Congress on Sunday that it has not changed its conclusions about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, removing a dark cloud that has been hanging over her campaign two days before Election Day.
As Mrs. Clinton delivers a broad closing argument, anchored in the theme of bringing the country together, her campaign surrogates and television commercials have also been stressing the historic nature of her candidacy and urging voters not to reward an opponent, Donald J. Trump, known for his crude treatment of women.
James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said in a letter to members of Congress that “based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, said in a television interview Sunday morning that electing a woman president was inherently difficult for the United States. “If it had been easy for a woman to be president in this country, we would have a woman president of the country,” Mr. Kaine said.
The news that the bureau was looking at emails that it found on the computer of a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, Huma Abedin, rocked the presidential race last month and provided a new opening for Donald J. Trump.
And campaigning in Florida on Friday and Saturday, Mr. Kaine repeatedly accused Mr. Trump of tapping into sexism as a political tactic. He reproached Mr. Trump for saying at a rally that military officers would not want to follow orders from Mrs. Clinton, and for suggesting that Mrs. Clinton does not look presidential.
Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said in a post on Twitter that the campaign was always confident that she would be cleared of any wrongdoing.
“Now, that’s pretty obvious — that’s pretty obvious what he was talking about,” Mr. Kaine said, adding: “We ought to just assume that this is tough.”
“We were always confident nothing would cause the July decision to be revisited,” Mr. Fallon said. “Now Director Comey has confirmed it.”
The Clinton campaign and supportive Democrats have echoed that theme insistently over the last few days, moving to maximize Mrs. Clinton’s support among women voters and blunt any advantage Mr. Trump may have among men.
Mr. Comey said in the letter that the bureau has reviewed all communications that were to or from Mrs. Clinton while she was secretary of state since he sent his last letter on Oct. 28.
President Obama made a forceful plea to male voters during a speech in Columbus, Ohio, last week, asking them to “look inside yourself” and ask if they were hesitant about Mrs. Clinton because she is a woman. The Clinton campaign also booked national airtime during football games on Sunday night to run a pair of commercials featuring men who said they could not vote for Mr. Trump because of the way he treats women.
In July, Mr. Comey said that although Mrs. Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless,” there was no evidence of intentional mishandling of classified information.
And Mrs. Clinton campaigned over the weekend with two singers, Katy Perry and Beyoncé, who have hailed Mrs. Clinton as a barrier-breaking candidate. At a concert in Cleveland, Beyoncé said a victory for Mrs. Clinton would be like the election of a black president in 2008.
In the immediate term, the letter removes a cloud that has hung over the Clinton campaign for a week since Mr. Comey announced his agents were reviewing new emails that might be related to an investigation into Mrs. Clinton that ended in July. But Mr. Comey’s move is sure to raise new questions from Democrats. Most importantly: Why did Mr. Comey raise the specter of wrongdoing before agents had even read the emails, especially since it only took days to determine they were not significant.
“I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman lead our country,” she said.
The Clinton campaign welcomed the news.
In some respects, the campaign of encouragement and reassurance echoes the Democrats’ successful push, in 2008, to ease any hesitation about Mr. Obama among white voters. That year, prominent white men in the party, including Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Richard L. Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., made intensive efforts to bring along reluctant white voters.
“We have seen Director Comey’s latest letter to the Hill,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the campaign. “We are glad to see he has found — as we were confident he would — that he has confirmed the conclusions he reached in July and we’re glad this matter is resolved.”
So far, early voting data suggests that women are already turning out at a higher rate than they did in 2012, and Mrs. Clinton has long enjoyed a big lead among women in polls. But by improving her position with certain groups of women, like white women without college degrees, Mrs. Clinton could close off Mr. Trump’s path in several key states.
Tom Bonier, a Democratic data strategist, said there was ample evidence that women were “especially motivated to vote in this election.” Mr. Bonier said that enthusiasm from women voters alone could push Mrs. Clinton’s final vote tally a percentage point above where she stands in public polls.
“In every single battleground state, women not only make up a clear majority of ballots cast thus far, but the female share of the electorate is larger than it was in the 2012 election,” said Mr. Bonier, who heads the firm TargetSmart. “What’s more, the polling in battleground states points towards a double-digit gender gap, with women favoring Hillary Clinton.”
Female voters may play an especially influential role in a few states Mr. Trump is targeting late in the campaign, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota, where there are fewer nonwhite voters and Mrs. Clinton’s lead depends in part on white women in the suburbs.
Mrs. Clinton began her day in Philadelphia, where turning out black voters is a priority for her campaign. Mrs. Clinton, speaking at the Mount Airy Church of God in Christ, framed the election in terms of historic struggles for equality, including the movements for women’s suffrage and black civil rights.
Mr. Trump has increasingly staked his candidacy on long-shot states in the Upper Midwest that have not voted Republican in a generation or more, in an attempt to escape the powerful backlash against his candidacy from Latino voters in states like Florida and Nevada.
He was scheduled to campaign at a frantic pace on Sunday, holding events in five states. With the exception of Iowa, where he is ahead in the polls, Mr. Trump is competing on unfriendly turf, scrounging for support in unlikely areas like liberal-leaning Minneapolis and the prosperous suburbs of Northern Virginia.
Where Mrs. Clinton has campaigned with an eye toward turning out specific voter groups in key states — firing up black voters in North Carolina and Latinos in South and Central Florida, for instance — Mr. Trump has crisscrossed a wider map of states, trumpeting the same fiery themes that have animated his candidacy from the start. With days left to campaign, he has done little to expand the reach of his message beyond his overwhelmingly white, less-educated political base.
But in a possible nod to the daunting gender gap in the race, Mr. Trump was joined on the trail on Saturday by his wife, Melania, who has seldom campaigned for him in public.
Despite the grim political map confronting his campaign, Mr. Trump’s closest allies insisted on the Sunday talk shows that he had captured the late momentum in the race. Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, Mr. Trump’s running mate, played down the notion that Mr. Trump was facing a backlash from communities he had offended, and predicted Mr. Trump’s campaign themes would resonate widely.
“The American people want change. That’s Americans coming from every category,” Mr. Pence said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “We’re on offense and the Clinton campaign is literally on defense, trying to shore up blue states.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign drew criticism over the weekend for releasing a two-minute closing advertisement that cast Mr. Trump as an opponent of international financial interests, and pictured three people – Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman; Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; and George Soros, the liberal investor — as emblematic of the forces aligned against Mr. Trump. All three of those people are Jewish.
In a statement, the Anti-Defamation League said the commercial had — perhaps unintentionally — invoked “subjects that anti-Semites have used for ages.”
