Last April, Hillary Clinton announced she was running to be the next president of the United States. Donald Trump did so in July. Now, after 80 percent of the states have had their say, including a set of resounding wins by each of them on Tuesday, Clinton and Trump are within arm’s length of facing off in the November general election.
Of the two, Trump’s nomination by the Republican Party is the less certain, but in his typical bombastic style he responded to a reporter’s question Tuesday night by saying he considers himself the presumptive nominee.
Clinton has not made that same declaration in the Democratic race. With a big delegate lead, she has in recent weeks both focused criticism on Trump at her campaign rallies, while also making overtures to supporters of her rival, Bernie Sanders. That continued Tuesday night as she advocated two key Sanders policies — addressing special interest money in politics and income inequality.
“I know together we will get that done because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us,” said Clinton.
Watch video report from VOA’s Jim Malone:
Despite having only a narrow mathematical chance, Sanders has pressed on, insisting he still has a path to the nomination and that he will stay in the race until the July convention.
American University political scholar James Thurber said Sanders is likely to begin changing his approach to move closer to Clinton.
“I think Bernie will reach back and try to get her to move in further over to his stands on minimum wage, family leave and other things like this, which won’t be that difficult for Hillary and won’t hurt her that much in terms of the general election,” Thurber said.
The Sanders campaign released a statement congratulating Clinton on her Tuesday primary wins. It says everyone should have a say in the party’s agenda, which is why he is fighting for every vote and for a progressive platform at the convention.
Thurber told VOA the wide ideological range in Trump’s policies could make it difficult for him to make a similar move to appeal to moderates.
“It’s not a traditional campaign in the sense that he’s driving hard right and then he’s going to come back to the middle. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He may try to do that, it’s going to be very hard though because of previous statements that he’s made about policies and people and categories of people like Hispanics, women and Muslims,” said Thurber.
Trump has repeatedly attacked Clinton throughout the campaign, including Tuesday night when he said she is only popular because she is a woman and would not get five percent of the vote if she were a man.
Multiple polls on a hypothetical November matchup between Trump and Clinton conducted in the past month show Clinton winning by about 9 percent. Trump does not agree.
“Now what’s happening is most of these people that have been fighting me are gone, and when I’m one-on-one with Hillary she will be, as I said, easier to take down, much easier to beat than many of the people I’ve already beaten,” he told supporters Tuesday.
It took Mitt Romney until the middle of May to secure the Republican nomination for the 2012 election he later lost to President Barack Obama. In 2008, Obama did not clinch the nomination, over Clinton, until early June, but his opponent that year, John McCain had his majority of delegates by March. The quick clinch by McCain was similar to previous election cycles, including John Kerry in 2004, Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996, all of whom became presumptive nominees in March.
The 2016 race looks more like a repeat of the protracted 2012 race.
“It hurts in terms of spending money and not focusing on the major issues of the battle between the two parties and it hurts by taking them away from using their resources to organize in those battleground states,” Thurber said.
He gave Clinton, the more experienced politician, an edge in terms of knowing what to do to organize their ground campaigns and said Trump will need to raise a lot of money instead of relying on himself to fund the campaign as it moves toward November.
“He has alienated the party, and he has alienated the other candidates, he has alienated the establishment of the party so much that they may just go down ballot and try to save those six, seven Republican Senate seats and try to reduce the inroads on Republican seats in the House and work on other races,” Thurber said.
The general election campaign will officially start at the end of July after each party has formally made their nomination. That will set off a familiar cycle of debates between the candidates and television commercials paid for by their campaigns and outside groups declaring why one should, or should not, take over the White House in January.
Thurber said the polarization that now exists in the United States is a reflection of continued anger at the government and the cementing of shifts away from the ideological center toward both the right and the left.
“The parties are quite far apart on guns, pro-choice/pro-life, on non-whites really with the Democratic Party at a higher percentage and not with the Republicans, and this election reinforces that, which is unfortunate for governing later on, whoever gets to become president,” said Thurber.
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