In the Indiana primary, Donald Trump effectively secured the Republican nomination, while the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost and continued to confirm that her candidacy falls flat with a significant segment of Democrats. Notwithstanding this liability, Democratic political professionals feel confident that Clinton will prevail comfortably over Trump in November. The Clinton campaign has even announced a drive to seek the votes of disaffected Republicans resistant to the notion of a Trump presidency. If the latter move sounds like the seeds of triangulation, the overall attitude exuding from the Clinton camp may well be the germinations of a November defeat for Democrats. Here are some major reasons why:
•Clinton thinks she'll be helped in November by the so-called gender gap. The gender gap, however, is widely misunderstood: It is in fact a racial gap. Barack Obama lost among white women in 2008 and 2012. What created a gender gap in favor of Democrats was Obama's overwhelming support among women of color. Granted, a woman has never headed a national ticket of a major party before, so perhaps Hillary Clinton can change the Republican lean of white women. But waging an election campaign based on an unproven theory of gender politics rather than historical voting patterns is campaign malpractice.
•Which leads to the second point. The New York Times recently reported that "Mrs. Clinton's campaign is repositioning itself, after a year of emphasizing liberal positions and focusing largely on minority voters, to also appeal to independent and Republican-leaning white voters turned off by Mr. Trump." Publicly declaring that you are about to begin taking your base for granted is hubris that feeds the already significant distrust of Clinton among progressives and Sanders supporters. It also reflects a failure to study history. In the 2000 election, Al Gore tacked to the middle, only to lose even his home state of Tennessee. What made Florida, and hence the national election, a cliffhanger was unexpectedly high black voter turnout. In the documentary "Counting on Democracy," Gore's campaign manager, Donna Brazile, admits that the campaign had failed to focus sufficiently on black voters, particularly with respect to educating them about the utterly confusing voting processes that would ultimately disqualify a number of their votes. The Clinton campaign sounds poised to repeat history.
•Commentator Van Jones recently issued a public warning to Democrats that Donald Trump, while hugely unpopular among black voters, could peel away enough votes in the election to take key swing states like Ohio, where he's currently polling at 15 percent. Slight changes in black turnout or support cost Democrats key contests in 2014. For instance, by doubling his support among black voters from 6 percent in 2010 to 12 percent in 2014, Republican Rick Scott was able to unexpectedly win reelection over Democrat Charlie Crist by a 1-point margin. As explained elsewhere, Republicans have neither a desire nor a need to capture the black vote; they only need to fracture it. Democrats often take the black vote for granted and have been burned by their arrogance repeatedly. Secretary Clinton may have been lulled into a sense of complacency regarding this demographic because her overwhelming support among Latino and southern black voters has essentially rendered her the Democratic nominee. But perhaps the more important figure for Clinton is the relatively low voter turnout in the primaries among these groups. Although primary turnout may not be a proxy for general election turnout, and although there may be multiple explanations for the lower turnout of the minority and youth votes this primary season, maybe--just maybe--a lack of excitement about the presumptive nomination of Clinton is a large factor.
•And let's be honest: Neither substantively nor stylistically has Secretary Clinton been an inspiring candidate. On the latter characteristic, after more than three decades in public life, she should simply be a better overall candidate than she's turning out to be. On the more important matter of substantive policy, consider Secretary Clinton's response to the simple question, asked during the last Democratic debate in Brooklyn, whether she supports a $15 per hour minimum wage: "I have supported the Fight for $15." This was a reference not to her actual position on what the national minimum wage should be--she supports $12 an hour--but rather to union efforts across the country to raise the minimum wage to $15 one city and state at a time. It's clever lawyering, but does Secretary Clinton really think she can lawyer her way to the presidency? Pivoting and positioning--and leaving progressive policies and bodies (read, Lani Guinier) in the ashes--is a hallmark of Clintonian triangulation. It won't, however, inspire the necessary turnout among the Democratic base. Donald Trump, a Republican, will be running to the left of the Democratic nominee on trade and on the historical but still live issue of the Iraq War. Clinton's vote in favor of that war was almost certainly as strategic and political as it was evidence-based. It's difficult to call the Iraq War a "war of choice," and claim it was only George W. Bush's choice. If politics motivated Bush, those who voted with him were not immune from these same forces.
•Finally, the notion that well-manicured, lawyerly answers can give one the keys to the White House in a season of rebellion; and the effrontery to go public with plans to court Republicans on the assumption that the Democratic base will simply fall into line, points to the sense of entitlement that has backfired on Secretary Clinton before. Yes, the email "scandal" is a partisan witch hunt, but, knowing that Republicans would be watching her every move, why did the Secretary hand them an issue by not erring on the side of using the State Department's server? And knowing that she likely would be running for president, why take hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from an entity associated with the dysphoria caused by the Great Recession of 2008? Why? It's the sense that one can engage in unwise--though perfectly legal--conduct and not be called to answer, or when called to answer, be able to lawyer one's way out of it. That sense of entitlement could well doom the Democrats' chances in November.
But perhaps all these warnings are for naught. Former United Nations Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young once described 1984 Democratic nominee Walter Mondale's campaign inner-circle as "smart-ass white boys who think they know it all." One gets a similar sense of Clinton's inner-circle, even if it may be somewhat more diverse in terms of sexual orientation and some other demographics. That sense of omnipotence earned Mondale an epic defeat. Unless she gets the memo, it may earn Clinton the short end of the stick in what will likely be a close election.