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MANCHESTER, N.H. — Three months ago, on a Monday night in New York, Robby Mook briefed a room full of donors and fundraisers on the progress of the campaign. Things back then were looking better. The summer was over and the email scandal was fading. There was the first debate and the Benghazi hearing and the feeling that momentum might finally be back on the side of Hillary Clinton.
Mook, her campaign manager, laid out a confident view of the next few months.
The primary, he told supporters at the November briefing, according to one attendee, would effectively be over by the end of March. (The 28 contests that month, Mook noted, would decide more than 56% of delegates.) In this best-case scenario, he said, the campaign could spend April through June framing the general election and defining the Republican best positioned to win the nomination.
Now, after a one-point win in Iowa and a double-digit loss in New Hampshire, the trajectory Mook charted some three months ago no longer seems probable. Instead, as polls closed here on Tuesday, before Clinton greeted a crowd in Southern New Hampshire University’s athletic center, the campaign manager released a memo to reporters headlined, “March Matters,” signaling the long road ahead.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Clinton said on stage with her husband and daughter. “We take this campaign to the entire country. We’re going to fight for every vote, in every state. We’re going to fight for real solutions that make a real difference in people’s lives.”
Since she got in the race last April, Clinton and her advisers have directed the large share of the campaign’s time and financial resources on the first four primary states: Iowa and New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. But ahead of those remaining two contests, members of Clinton’s team sought on primary day to forecast close races there, too — particularly on Feb. 20 in Nevada, a state her aides once regarded with confidence.
Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, appearing on MSNBC on Tuesday morning, pointed to a story by the Washington Post listing three reasons that Sanders, not Clinton, might have the upper hand in the Democratic caucuses there. (“A smart item,” Fallon said.)
How important is Nevada, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked him.
“Nevada is an important state. So is South Carolina, which comes after that.”
And are both must-wins?
“There's going to be a narrowing in both places. We’re clear-eyed about that,” said Fallon. “There's an important Hispanic element to the Democratic caucus in Nevada. But it's still a state that is 80% white voters,” Fallon said when asked if Clinton considered Nevada a must-win. “You have a caucus-style format, and he'll have the momentum coming out of New Hampshire presumably, so there's a lot of reasons he should do well.”
“There's a reason to believe the race will tighten even there,” he said again.
The more cautious posture marked a significant shift as Clinton moves into next phase of her race against Sanders. For months, campaign officials cast Nevada as one of several safeguards in the primary calendar. Clinton, aides said, would benefit from the Latino population and from Mook’s experience in the state, where he led her campaign in 2008.
During his November briefing, according to the attendee, Mook assured the room of donors and fundraisers that Clinton’s Nevada operation there was already well ahead of their rivals. Sanders, he told them, had only just started organizing for the state’s caucuses. (Clinton has approximately 35 staffers at their Nevada headquarters, according a person close to the campaign.) Two months later, on a conference call with supporters, campaign officials shared internal polling that showed Clinton up as much as 25 points in Nevada.
There is no recent public polling in the state. The last poll, conducted by Gravis Marketing the week of Christmas, put Clinton up 23 points. (A CNN/ORC poll in October showed Clinton with a 16-point advantage.)
The campaign in recent weeks has already started to shift resources to the March states that follow Nevada and South Carolina. The memo from Mook promised that Clinton would be “competing aggressively” in both states, but stressed a wider demographic advantage in many of the 28 primaries and caucuses planned for next month. “Whereas the electorates in Iowa and New Hampshire are largely rural/suburban and predominantly white,” Mook writes, “the March states better reflect the true diversity of the Democratic Party and the nation – including large populations of voters who live in big cities and small towns, and voters with a much broader range of races and religions.”
By the end of March, campaign officials hope Clinton will be positioned with a delegate lead that Mook described in his memo as “potentially insurmountable.”
In her concession speech here outside of Manchester — far more fiery and spirited than at her pseudo-victory rally last week — Clinton pledged to fight on into the next phase of the race. “I know I have some work to do, particularly with young people,” she acknowledged. “But I will repeat again what I have said this week: Even if they are not supporting me now, I support them. Because I know, I’ve had a blessed life, but I also know what it’s like to stumble and fall. And so many people across America know that feeling. And we’ve learned it’s not whether you get knocked down that matters, it’s whether you get back up,” Clinton said to cheers across the gymnasium.
But on the last day of her New Hampshire campaign — as she rallied the crowd and worked the ropeline and departed Manchester for New York, then Nevada and South Carolina and all the states that follow — there was still the lingering, if tacit acknowledgement of how differently, and quickly, this race was expected to go.
“Brian, looks like we're in a long slog,” Todd asked on Tuesday morning.
“We're ready,” said Fallon.
See you in California in June?
“We're ready to wage a nomination contest that goes for several months,” Fallon said again.
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/20UAjzv
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