Author: craigcrawford

Unless something changes, it is becoming clear that Hillary Clinton will have to do without many Bernie Sanders supporters in November. Perhaps it was always in the cards but don’t think Clinton/DNC trashing of Bernie helped matters. NBC/WSJ poll shows 41% of Sanders supporters view her negatively and only 2/3 say they would vote for her against Trump.

Barack Obama called Hillary Clinton “Annie Oakley” in 2008 for what he portrayed as her diffidence about gun control. This year she has embraced it with vigor, and is now engaging the issue against Donald Trump, who just secured the NRA endorsement.

The voter breakdown: Hillary is now depending on a coalition of non-white voters and college educated white women who mostly back gun control. Trump is aiming for non-college and non-urban white voters who are passionately against gun control.

Going back to Al Gore 2000 and Bill Clinton’s disastrous first-term Midterm (following the ban on assault weapons) Democrats have not done well when tackling this issue. The Clinton-Trump match up is shaping up as a test for whether voters have shifted to the left on this one, enough to make Hillary’s stand the winning position.

The infamous Koch brothers reportedly hate Donald Trump, but instead of dropping a dime to stop him they long ago chose to opt out of this presidential campaign cycle. Word is they decided that joining the Never-Trump brigades would only boost his momentum. Sounds like they wimped out, and considering they are certainly not Hillary fans, two of the mightiest conservative donors in the country are on the sidelines.

It is like the TV show Glee didn’t shut down after all. Now starring Bernie, Hillary, Donald as rival chorus leaders sabotaging their way to Nationals. Slushies for all!

The same Super Pac that spent $66.5 million ripping Mitt Romney’s face off in 2012 has just begun a similar crusade against Donald Trump with a $6 million television ad buy over the next 3 weeks in Florida, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia — battleground states where recent polls have shown a surprisingly tight race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s former big money attack dog, Priorities USA, which is now working for Clinton, is paying for the ads (see below) targeting Trump’s reputation as a sexist pig. Republican primary foes and their super-pac pals tried this approach, but it was too little, too late, and fell on mostly deaf ears among the GOP rank and file.

A broader, more diverse general election audience might see these ads a bit differently. How they test market over the next month will be most telling about whether the Clinton campaign can take down the Donald.

Trump’s Response
Quick to react, the soon-to-be GOP nominee tweeted the reaction he has used before when his treatment of women is at issue: “Amazing that Crooked Hillary can do a hit ad on me concerning women when her husband was the WORST abuser of woman in U.S. political history.” He has also called Hillary an “enabler” of Bill’s womanizing who victimized his accusers, making these next few weeks a test of whether his counter punch against the Clinton pac ads is effective.