How Hillary Clinton should go in for the kill

Hillary Clinton's extraordinary run of good electoral luck is continuing, with Donald Trump in a full-blown meltdown over the party's reaction to his 2005 comments about sexual assault. He's attacking Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, "disloyal R's," and darkly implying that black people are going to steal the election from him. As a result, his poll numbers are in free-fall.

This is a magnificent opportunity for Clinton and every other Democrat in a tight race. Trump is more and more unpopular, but Republican base voters still support him — thus putting every Republican running for election on the horns of a dilemma. Either disavow Trump, and disappoint and anger base voters, or stay behind him, and go down in flames with the #TrumpTrain. Every Democrat must constantly press this point — and stop the habit of portraying Trump as some weird aberration from normal Republican politics.

Clinton must be the leader in such an effort. The presidential race is sucking up virtually all the media oxygen and attention from voters. It's an unfortunate but undeniable fact that ordinary people pay vastly more attention to presidential elections than to local ones, where their votes are dramatically more likely to matter. But there's no changing that, and so Clinton needs to define the overall election from the top.

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Thus far she has rather done the opposite, portraying Trump as a deviation from normal Republican politics, in contrast to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. In the last debate, she said she disagreed with previous nominees on politics, but "never questioned their fitness to serve. Donald Trump is different." On one level this is somewhat understandable. Trump really is an odd nominee — parties virtually never nominate someone for president with no political experience at all.

But on another level, Trump totally is a normal product of Republican politics. Ronald Reagan was also a TV celebrity. George W. Bush opposed climate change treaties and denied evolution. State Republicans have been lambasted in federal courts for systematically disenfranchising black people. The party as a whole has been more consumed with racist conspiracy derp with every passing year — indeed, Trump rode the signature conspiracy theory of the Obama presidency to political prominence. Most fundamentally, who cares if associating Trump with other Republicans is unfair in some cosmic sense. They nominated him for president, and they own him, plain and simple.

Now, I see Clinton's thinking here. The idea is to try to attract Republican votes by presenting Trump as a non-Republican.

The problems with this are threefold. First, it's extremely difficult to overcome negative polarization. Republicans simply loathe Hillary Clinton, and it will be nearly impossible to convince them otherwise. Second, left-wing young voters are turned off by open pandering to Republicans — and Clinton has already struggled fairly hard to lock them up. Finally, that strategy forecloses the alternative strategy of splitting Republicans on the anvil of Trump.

The fact that Clinton's margins are opening up, and Trump is flaming out, should settle this argument. Just shy of three-quarters of Republicans think the party should stick with Trump, but his poll numbers are falling like a rock. Clinton has opened up a 6.5 point margin in the polling average, which is nearly enough for Democrats to retake the House of Representatives, and increasing fast. Also, there are reportedly zillions of other grotesque clips out there from Trump's lengthy TV career, some perhaps even more damaging than the last one, which are only just beginning to trickle out.

Democrats should follow the example of Terri Bonoff, who is running to represent Minnesota's third congressional district. She recently cut an ad, pressing her opponent to disavow Trump's comments. It's simple and effective.

Hillary Clinton is often portrayed as a legendary political brawler, but sometimes she seems to lack a really bloodthirsty partisan instinct. The object now, instead of cautiously sitting back with a prevent defense and letting Trump hang himself, should be to go in for the kill, especially down the ballot. Every Republican candidate should be walloped with the deranged nominee, every minute of every day, and every Republican base voter should be either applauding their local nominee's support of bile and hatred, or hanging their head in despair at yet another RINO giving in to political correctness. Anything less will mean a missed chance at total control of D.C.