How Hillary Clinton can erode Donald Trump's base

Hillary Clinton has had a good week.

She concluded a successful convention that united the Democratic Party and positioned her as the presidential candidate who believes in America's future. In its wake, her opponent has gone into full meltdown mode, attacking a Gold Star family and, in response to widespread outrage, doubling down on his attacks. Worse still, at least from a partisan Republican's perspective, he's threatened to withhold his support from Republican officeholders like House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) who have been critical of some of his more outrageous outbursts. And as his standing in the polls has fallen, he's begun encouraging his supporters to view any loss as the illegitimate result of a rigged election.

The panic has gotten bad enough that there is talk of mass defections from the Republican leadership. All of which no doubt has the Clinton campaign ecstatic. If she can win over a good number of relatively sane Republicans, surely she'll win in a landslide.

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I'm not so sure. And even if I were sure that it would work, I'm not sure it's the right thing to do.

First of all, it's not clear how many head of cattle those big-hatted Republican leaders are actually driving. Remember, in the Republican primaries, 70 percent of the vote went to the two candidates deemed least acceptable to the Republican leadership. For all we know, Reince Preibus himself could endorse Clinton and it wouldn't move the needle.

Second, Clinton still needs to turn out her own voters. Let's say she actually could get the endorsement of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Jeb Bush. How would Democrats who favored Bernie Sanders during the primaries feel about that? Is she so sure that the gains she made on the Republican side would outweigh the losses she'd face from her own base?

Third, Trump's entire campaign strategy has been running against a rigged system — and against the leadership of both parties. Bipartisan support for Hillary Clinton only reinforces the narrative that got Trump the nomination. Is she so sure that wouldn't help him in the general election as well?

Fortunately, Clinton doesn't need to win over Republican leaders. A Mitt Romney endorsement of Gary Johnson would be worth far more than any prominent Republican defections to Clinton herself. Clinton does need to reach out to college-educated whites — whom she has a good shot at being the first Democrat to win in 60 years. But doing so doesn't require her to pinch policy ideas from Paul Ryan. It's enough that she portray herself as steady, mainstream, and non-radical.

Clinton is already doing that, and her vice presidential pick reinforced that message. But the other thing Clinton needs to do is limit her losses among white voters without a college education — Trump's base. That effort would be set back badly by an overt pitch for elite Republican votes — because these are the very people who voted in record numbers to repudiate the Republican leadership. So what can she do to limit her losses in this crucial demographic segment?

One approach, which the Clinton campaign has already taken, is to relentlessly attack Trump's credibility with his core supporters. Trump's history of stiffing small businesses, of hiring foreign workers, and of outsourcing the manufacturing of his branded consumer products to Mexico, China, and other countries — all of these provide the basis for powerful attacks, not because they reveal Trump's hypocrisy but because they reveal him to be an outright charlatan. They won't win Clinton any votes, but they might dampen enthusiasm for Trump.

But Clinton also needs to figure out how to pitch the Democratic message to Trump voters. And that's something she hasn't done nearly as much of.

Take trade. Clinton has backed off of her earlier support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but nobody really believes she's changed her mind about the importance of globalization. Inasmuch as the Democrats are comfortable talking about the costs of globalization, they respond by talking about retraining for the jobs of the future. It's not hard to see why that sounds rather patronizing to somebody who's watched their local economy get wrecked as factories shutter and move to cheaper-wage destinations.

But Clinton could talk about making globalization work in terms that aren't so patronizing. She could say that trade is vital to American prosperity, but too often trade deals are negotiated to maximize profits for American corporations. Instead, she's going to focus on maximizing the returns to American workers. She could say that America has a national interest in protecting and rejuvenating its manufacturing base, and that she'll make it a priority to build incentives to invest in American manufacturing into deals designed to facilitate the free movement of capital. She could say that one reason companies move their factories abroad is that some other countries have laxer labor and environmental standards, and that only Democrats can be trusted not to engage in a race to the bottom but to defend America's jobs and America's ethics. And she could steal Trump’s line about holding countries accountable for currency manipulation, or for refusing to open their own markets to products that are made (and not just designed) in America.

None of that is exactly what the Chamber of Commerce wants to hear. But how many actual voters are going to be turned off?

Or take immigration. Clinton's Democrats are eager to get massive turnout and historic margins from the Hispanic and Asian-American communities. Trump is doing everything he can to facilitate that goal, and Clinton surely doesn't want to screw it up. But that doesn't mean Clinton can't talk about immigration in terms that might mean something to Trump voters.

She could say that one reason big business likes easy access to foreign workers is that such workers have less leverage to organize for higher wages and better conditions. A higher minimum wage and tough enforcement of our labor laws would make businesses invest in training American workers so they could get more value out of them, rather than looking for the quick fix of cheap imported labor. She could also acknowledge that the costs of immigration are not distributed in the same way as the benefits, and that communities suffering from those costs deserve assistance — paid for by those who reap the benefits. And finally, she can talk in terms of values, stressing, for example, that nothing helps immigrants succeed better than rapidly learning English, and that immigrants themselves overwhelmingly want to become part of the American mainstream — so America’s education system should focus on making that happen as quickly as possible.

None of that is exactly the way advocates of open borders would want her to talk. But, again, how many actual voters is she going to lose by talking this way?

Of course, someone might counter that she isn't going to win a lot of voters this way either. Clinton's job is to assemble a winning coalition. If that coalition is basically the Obama coalition, and if what motivates that coalition to come out in force is solidarity with the rest of the progressive tribe, then a win's a win, right?

Not quite.

First, the only way Trump can plausibly win the election is by turning out huge margins among the group I'm suggesting Clinton try to reach out to. Doing that requires turning out infrequent voters who may not make it through pollsters' "likely voter" screens — which means polls may lull the Clinton camp into a false sense of security. She can't get better information if she isn't even trying to reach these voters. She certainly can't do it if she decides deliberately to draw a line between those voters and her voters, for the sake of motivating her own coalition.

Second, and more important, once the election is over she will have to govern, and to be the president of all of the American people. To do that, she needs to be speaking, now, to the entire American people. And she needs to speak to them in their language, not try to convince them to speak hers. More than is usually the case, there's a risk that this election will be seen by both sides as a conflict between rival tribes. And societies that view their elections this way do not generally have peaceful transitions of power.

Donald Trump has already made it clear that he doesn't care if that's one result of his campaign. Hillary Clinton needs to distinguish herself from him, in this way most of all.