With Hillary Clinton opening up a sizable lead in the polls the past few weeks, the Democratic candidate faces an interesting choice of what strategy to take in the home stretch of the campaign: Stay on her current course for an apparent victory or go for a landslide that could include states that Democrats haven’t won in a generation, The Washington Post reports.
The advantage for taking a risk and diverting resources to places where victories would be unexpected is twofold for Clinton – to create more of a mandate for herself once she takes office in January and to diminish the effect of any complaints by the Trump campaign that the election was rigged.
But to stick to the strategy of concentrating on winning core battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania has its own advantages, as some of those states also have key Senate battles that could help Clinton capture the upper chamber and make it easier for her to implement her agenda in January.
Clinton has the flexibility to shift attention, because she has taken double digit leads in polls in some states where Trump thought he had a chance to be competitive, such as Virginia, and the Republican candidate has thus reportedly pulled resources from those places, making it much less necessary for the Democrats to invest in those states.
In one such example of surveys showing Clinton with a clear Electoral College advantage, NBC News reported that following both the revelation of the 2005 tape showing Trump making lewd comments about women and the second presidential debate with all the nastiness surrounding it, Clinton has expanded her lead in polls and now has enough electoral votes to win the election
As part of the strategy to help key Senate candidates in battleground states, Democrats are running coordinated campaigns there, which means money is being spent to help the entire ticket and not just Clinton.
There are also discussions among the Democratic strategists whether to increase other funding, such as television ads, for those Senate races.
As for the plan for going for as big a landslide as possible, some strategists point to Arizona as an example of a state worth the investment. Since 1948 only Bill Clinton has carried the state (in 1996), but some say demographics in Arizona are trending in the right direction for Democrats to emerge victorious.
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