Hillary Clinton's Southern strategy

Why the Democratic nominee must take the fight to the conservative heartland

Hillary Clinton campaigns in North Carolina.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Jason Miczek)

Donald Trump's campaign is in free fall. His polling average across all swing states is a mere 37 percent. His ground operation is a mess. And now he's hired Stephen Bannon, the CEO of perhaps the most despicable and amoral major media outlet in the country, Breitbart, to run his campaign. The next few months are going to be extremely loud and obnoxious.

But it's good news for Hillary Clinton. She now has enough states in the bag to almost certainly win the election if it were held today — and she's getting astonishingly close in several states in the South, where the Democratic Party has largely ceased to exist outside of a few enclaves. Trump's meltdown gives her a rare opportunity to shift resources away from traditional swing states like Colorado or Virginia (where the latest polls give her a double-digit lead in both) and into real reach goals in the traditional heartland of American conservatism.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.