Clinton's focus: Aid Democrats

Trump keys on swing states

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event Sunday at The Quad at Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, N.C.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a campaign event Sunday at The Quad at Saint Augustine’s University in Raleigh, N.C.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Hillary Clinton is turning her attention away from Donald Trump, saying she will spend the final two weeks of the campaign helping Democrats in Senate and House races.

photo

AP

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks Sunday during a rally in Naples, Fla.

Though Trump's campaign insisted Sunday that it was premature to count him out, it's Clinton whose path to winning the White House has only grown wider in the race's final weeks. Even longtime Republican strongholds such as Arizona and Utah suddenly appear within her reach on Nov. 8, enticing Democrats to campaign hard in territory they haven't won for decades.

The shifting political map has freed Clinton and her well-funded campaign to spend time and money helping other Democrats in competitive races. Clinton said she didn't "even think about responding" to Trump anymore and would instead spend the final weeks on the road "emphasizing the importance of electing Democrats down the ballot."

"We're running a coordinated campaign, working hard with gubernatorial, Senate and House candidates," said Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager.

[INTERACTIVE: Video highlights from presidential, vice presidential debates]

The next president will face the daunting task of governing a bitterly divided nation. If Clinton wins, her prospects for achieving her goals will be greatly diminished unless her victory is accompanied by major Democratic gains in Congress.

"We've got to do the hard and maybe most important work of healing, healing our country," Clinton said Sunday at Union Baptist Church in Durham, N.C.

For Democrats, there's another reason to try to run up the score. With Trump warning he may contest the race's outcome if he loses, Clinton's campaign is hoping for an overwhelming Democratic victory that would undermine any attempt by Trump to claim the election had been stolen from him.

RNC Confident

Trump's campaign acknowledged he's trailing Clinton as Election Day nears.

"[Clinton] has some advantages, like $66 million in ad buys just in the month of September, thereby doubling her ad buys from August," said Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager, on NBC's Meet the Press. "Now, most of those ads are negative against Donald Trump -- classic politics of personal destruction, cesspool kind of ads. And she has tremendous advantages: She has a former president, who happens to be her husband, campaigning for her. The current president and first lady, vice president, all much more popular than she can hope to be."

On Fox News Sunday, Conway said Trump is focused on winning Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and, possibly, Nevada, while protecting Arizona and Georgia, which are traditionally Republican states but have seen bursts of support for Clinton in polls.

On CNN' State of the Union, Conway would not say whether she had known ahead of time that Trump planned to use a major policy speech in Gettysburg, Pa., on Saturday to lash out at women who have accused him of sexual assault, calling them "liars" and threatening to sue them after the election.

"Well, I was there at the speech yesterday in Gettysburg," Conway said, then pivoted to a description of the policy stances that were outlined in Trump's speech but were overshadowed by his defensive comments.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is also confident of Trump's chances.

"He is going to win," Priebus told CBS' John Dickerson on Sunday on Face the Nation. "Because I think people have had enough."

Trump has been mired in controversy over the past week about whether he would accept the election's results. Trump has said he would do so -- if he wins.

"What I think the media is missing here is that, to ask a candidate three weeks before the election if they are going to concede -- asking for a concession speech -- no one does that," Priebus said. "And I think if ... you lose by 200 votes in Florida, are you going to concede on election night if you're at 260 electoral votes?"

Dickerson challenged Priebus' interpretation of Trump's hesitation to accept the results of the election. This comes in the context of Trump's claiming in increasingly heated rhetoric that the election is "rigged," Dickerson pointed out.

"But his mouth is in a different place than where you think his head is," Dickerson said. "He said if he loses Pennsylvania, a state Republicans haven't won since '88, it will only be because the state was stolen from him."

Priebus: "I don't think that's where he's at. That's not where I'm at. Losing by 100 votes is one thing. Losing by 100,000 votes is another thing. I think we can be reasonable on this issue."

Eric Trump cast his father as the victim of a smear campaign when asked to respond to numerous new allegations from women, who have said the Republican presidential nominee made sexual advances toward them against their will over the past three decades.

On ABC's This Week on Sunday morning, the younger Trump defended his father calling all the women "liars" and threatening to sue his accusers.

"He believes in a right and wrong, and when he feels that there's injustice, I think you should stand up to ourselves," Eric Trump said. "Quite frankly, he's a great fighter, and he believes in calling out right and wrong."

Campaigning Sunday in Florida, Trump called for voters to elect a Republican House and Senate that would "swiftly enact" his priorities, which include overhauling taxes, restoring higher spending on defense and repealing the Affordable Care Act.

"We can enact our whole plan in the first 100 days -- and we will," Trump said.

House, Senate Races

If Clinton wins -- in which case Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine, would serve as a tiebreaker in the Senate -- Democrats would need a net gain of four Senate seats to retake the majority. House control would be much harder, considering Republicans currently enjoy their largest House majority since 1931. Democrats would need a 30-seat gain, a feat they haven't accomplished in roughly four decades.

Clinton's nascent focus on helping fellow Democrats comes with an inherent contradiction. For months, she deliberately avoided the strategy employed by other Democrats of trying to saddle all Republicans with an unpopular Trump. In August, she said Trump represented the "radical fringe," rather than the mainstream of the Republican Party.

"We have not run this campaign as a campaign against the GOP with the big broad brush -- we've run it against Donald Trump," Kaine said in a weekend interview with The Associated Press.

Painting Trump as too extreme even for the GOP was a strategy intended to help Clinton win over voters who identify as Republicans but dislike Trump. Yet it's been a major sore point for Democratic campaign groups, illustrated by an internal Democratic National Committee email in May that was hacked and later disclosed by WikiLeaks.

"They don't want us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal," top DNC official Luis Miranda wrote under the subject line "Problem with HFA," an acronym for Hillary For America.

Still, Clinton's campaign said she remained intent on reaching out to GOP voters and was specifically targeting Republican politicians who haven't denounced Trump. Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the policies Clinton has prioritized for her first 100 days "are ones that Republicans should have every reason to work with us on."

Mook said Sunday that there is no evidence to suggest that the State Department used the Clinton Foundation as political leverage during Hillary Clinton's time as secretary of state or that Democratic Party officials tried to incite violence at Trump's rallies.

Mook said on State of the Union that he's "not aware" of any contact between the Clinton campaign and the women who have accused Trump of touching them inappropriately.

Mook said he can't comment on what happened during Clinton's time as secretary of state, but he added that President Barack Obama's administration had stringent rules in place to prevent the sort of thing Trump is accusing Clinton of. "I can't even verify whether the content is real," Mook said of the emails. Clinton's campaign has not authenticated any of the hacked documents.

Mook also denied any Clinton campaign involvement in a video leaked last week by conservative activist James O'Keefe purporting to show two little-known but influential Democratic political consultants taking credit for inciting violence at a Trump rally, among other political tricks. Both operatives, Scott Foval and Robert Creamer, lost their jobs related to the Democratic presidential ticket. Neither was directly tied to the Clinton campaign.

Meanwhile, Kaine is shrugging off any possibility that he could be embarrassed by the release of hacked emails.

WikiLeaks, which has been posting stolen emails from Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta, has twice taunted the Democratic vice presidential candidate that he's in for a "surprise." U.S. intelligence officials say the leaked Podesta emails are part of a series of high-profile computer hacks of Democratic targets orchestrated by the Russian government.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday in Boston, Kaine said he's a "regular human being" and he has nothing to be "overly embarrassed about."

Obama, in Nevada campaigning for Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto, was unsparing in his criticism of Trump, describing the billionaire businessman as unfit to serve as president. Obama said that for years, Republican politicians and far right media outlets have trumped up "all kinds of crazy stuff" about him, Clinton and Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. He cited as an example those who questioned whether he was born in the U.S. or alleged that he would take everybody's guns away.

"Is it any wonder that they ended up nominating somebody like Donald Trump," Obama said, claiming that Republican lawmakers stood by and said nothing because it gave them a political advantage.

"So Donald Trump did not start this," Obama said. "He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it and promote it."

Masto is facing Republican Rep. Joe Heck to replace Reid, who is retiring.

Information for this article was contributed by Josh Lederman, Catherine Lucey, Emily Swanson, Jill Colvin Naples, Kathleen Ronayne, Alan Suderman and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press and by Jenna Johnson, Amber Phillips and Amy B. Wang of The Washington Post.

A Section on 10/24/2016

Upcoming Events