The sun shone brightly on an uncharacteristically warm afternoon in late October as Terry McAuliffe, the state’s Democratic governor and a longtime friend of Clinton, fired up the crowd with an impassioned
introduction.
McAuliffe was only midway through his remarks when the audience broke into chants of “Hillary, Hillary, Hillary”. Their excitement was compounded when he invoked a marathon hearing a day before, in which the former secretary of state maintained her composure as Republicans grilled her in the most dramatic fashion regarding the September 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
“You want to talk about a fighter – how about those 11 hours of testimony yesterday?” McAuliffe said. “I almost want to thank [the Republicans], because you saw in that 11 hours of testimony, this is why she needs to be our commander-in-chief.”
The crowd roared in agreement.
While Clinton has appeared before countless crowds of supporters since launching her second presidential campaign, there was a palpable buoyancy to this audience –the kind of grassroots enthusiasm political observers have wondered if Clinton is capable of generating.
But a lot has changed since the soft launch of her campaign in April, and many believe the month of October has solidified her standing as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
It has been a rollercoaster six months since Clinton declared her candidacy with an upbeat web video, followed by a cross-country trip in a Chevy van nicknamed “Scooby”. Discussions with voters at stops in Iowa were meant to display that for all her celebrity, she remained relatable – comfortable in conversations with everyday Americans, a good listener.
That image was disrupted, however, by frustration among the press over Clinton’s avoidance of questions as she visited key early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire. The emphasis of early reports was not the substance of Clinton’s dialogue with voters, but rather on when she last fielded a question from a journalist. The Washington Post built a Clinton question clock that ran for most of May without her answering one.
A portrait emerged of a controlled campaign, in which roundtable participants were hand-picked and questions screened. At a July parade in New Hampshire, Clinton aides whipped out a rope and corralled journalists, fueling a sense that the candidate was off-limits.
The email issue, meanwhile, continued to percolate. Clinton’s use of a personal email account and private server while serving as President Obama’s first secretary of state was first reported in early March. Critics voiced alarm that she had handled classified information inappropriately or had sought to avoid the transparency requirements of public service.
Her campaign said she had wanted to avoid the inconvenience of carrying two mobile devices – one work and one personal – and that the government’s email system was so bad that other top officials did not use it, either. Clinton said she had not handled classified information on the account, although that contention was later called into question. Evidence either way has not so far been made public.
A congressional inquiry was launched, but more disturbingly for Clinton supporters, the FBI decided to investigate. The Republicans pounced with selective leaks to the press as part of a broader effort to tie Clinton’s email server to questions surrounding the attacks in Benghazi, in which four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, were killed.
In September, a Washington Post poll found that support for Clinton among Democratic female voters had slid 29 points in eight weeks.
But as much as the rise of the emails controversy and Clinton’s slide in the polls correlated, the line of causation was much less clear. While the media reported relentlessly on Clinton’s emails, there was little polling to indicate that the issue had gained traction with the public. Clinton’s favorability among Democrats remained at the top of the pack, at nearly 74%, and her lead nationally over the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders dipped only once, briefly, below 20 points.
“She came in as the prohibitive favorite,” said Howard Dean, a former Democratic governor of Vermont and one-time presidential candidate. “And the press hates the prohibitive favorite. But she rallied, and she hung in there … I think she’s earned what she’s got.”
Indeed, the unexpected rise of Sanders in certain early primary states gave way to a new narrative: that Clinton’s second bid for the White House was becoming a redux of 2008, when her campaign was blindsided by a relatively unknown senator named Barack Obama.
Parallels were drawn to the unmistakable energy among grassroots supporters in favor of Sanders, an independent running on an impassioned plea for economic equality. In August, Sanders staged rallies in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, that drew overflow crowds of almost 30,000 each – five times the size of the biggest Clinton event at the time.
Campaign finance filings made Sanders’ advantage with the grassroots even more stark. In the third quarter, he raised more than $20m – or 77% of his total – from small donors giving less than $200 apiece. Clinton raised only $5.2m of her $28 million haul from small donors. Sanders passed her in polling in New Hampshire, the state with the first primary voting, and closed the gap in Iowa, the site of the first caucuses.
Next to Sanders was another Democrat causing the Clinton campaign anxiety. For months, Vice-President Joe Biden had seemed unable to decide whether to mount a presidential run. Biden’s indecision directly undercut Clinton, with some donors urging the two-time presidential candidate to once again enter the race.
The competing pressures were enough to push the Clinton campaign in September to change direction, but even the resulting announcement became a moment for mirth. From now on, her campaign said, Clinton would exhibit more spontaneity, empathy and warmth. It sounded like something out of the satirical newspaper The Onion, tweeted former top Obama advisor David Axelrod.
But even as the 24/7 news cycle established an account of a candidate in deep trouble, Clinton’s campaign maintained its confidence.
Although the decisions to come out against the controversial Keystone XL pipeline and Obama’s historic 12-nation Pacific Rim trade pact reflected the tangible impact of the Democratic primary on her campaign, Clinton sustained her focus on the general election.
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