Hillary's flawed strategy for defeating Donald Trump

It's essentially the exact same strategy attempted by the Republican establishment which proved wildly ineffective (although I at one time bought in and thought it would work). That strategy is to play to college-educated voters who feel the current system of American politics is working for them and don't believe Trump is a serious presidential candidate worth taking a risk on.

These people are generally clustered in suburbs and cities and there's definitely a fair number of them. These were the people that were voting for Rubio or Kasich in the Republican primary and also swelled the ranks of people that ultimately propelled Clinton past Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

You can see the evidence of this being her strategy based on her recent selection of Virginia senator Tim Kaine as her VP and in the ways in which she's attacked and countered against Donald Trump.

Kaine is another establishment Democrat with a neo-liberal approach to foreign policy (he's backed free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and the ability to pander speak in spanish to the Latino voters that they'll be counting on. He's also a fairly boring persona that won't upstage Clinton while allowing the campaign to double down on presenting voters with an option to continue business as usual with experienced leadership.

Her attacks on Trump have centered around labeling him as a racist, an authoritarian, and a dangerous mad man who will expose the country to grave risks due to his volatile nature and lack of experience. These are all attacks that will appeal to college-educated folks who perceive of themselves as being above racism and unwilling to take risks when things are going well enough.

Like in the GOP primary, I don't think that's a very strong strategy for the following reasons...

Problem One: Rebuilding the Obama coalition

The first problem with this strategy by Clinton is that the Obama coalition that propelled the Democrats into power back in 2008 was much broader than "risk-averse, college-educated voters."

Besides Bush losing traction with voters, the GOP also got swamped in 2008 by the fact that Obama brought a ton of new voters into the electorate so that whereas in 2004 we saw 121 million people vote, 2008 featured 129.3 million voters and 2012 still saw 126.8 million voters.

Even if McCain or Romney had enjoyed the appeal of Bush they still would have been trounced by Obama's ascendant coalition.

What Obama did so successfully was fire up the massive population of millennial voters entering the electorate and win their support with massive margins. Those millennial voters recently went for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and generally view Clinton very unfavorably.

Now wikileaks is releasing all of these Democratic National Committee emails indicating that the party conspired to stop Sanders and is filled with the kinds of corruption that Sanders was decrying during the primary.

So here's a closer view of the efforts by the Clinton campaign to get millennials to come out in large numbers again and vote for her over Donald Trump:

via GIPHY

Problem Two: Pointing and shrieking at Russia isn't a viable defense

One of the best ways to unite a diverse collection of people is to pit them against a common enemy. Investigations into the DNC leaks have suggested that Russia is behind the hack and that they are now releasing the data in an attempt to hurt Clinton and assist Trump. The Democrats have been keen to try and make this the prevailing narrative, "look how Putin is interfering in American politics!!!!!"

Of course, the Russians didn't write the emails where DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspired with fellow Democrats and media to stop Bernie Sanders, nor the emails where the party planned to reward big donors with government appointments. Sanders voters who feel cheated by the current American political system don't really care if they only know about the corruption thanks to Putin, the problem here is that the system seems rigged against them.

Trump is playing average Americans against the nation's ruling elites, Clinton is trying to unite them back behind the ruling elites and against the Russians.

But Russia just isn't viewed as being this horrifying opposing power anymore. Check out this Gallop survey on how Americans perceived Russia back in February. There will be some that are outraged that Russian interests are playing a role in the American election and there will be some that view Russia as having increased moral credibility due to their willingness to battle ISIS directly (at least nominally) and to expose DNC corruption.

Problem Three: Terrorism and national defense

The margins of victory that Clinton will need amongst college-educated voters to take down Trump's coalition is going to have to be pretty sizable. It's worth pausing to note that what Trump has essentially done is unite the two factions that fought each other in the Civil War, working class whites in both the North and the South, into one big party. That's likely to result in some pretty big voting numbers and 538 already has projections showing what kind of electoral map that's likely to produce in November.

That leaves this remaining problem for Clinton, which is overcoming the hurdle of her own hawkish foreign policy preferences combined with her weakness on rule of law issues. Do you know who loves feeling secured by the rule of law? College-educated folk living in suburbs or gentrified, urban locales.

Clinton's warm embrace the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has started to come across more negatively amongst security-loving suburbanites after a rash of shootings that victimized police officers, is a problem for her. It may help her maintain Obama's large margins of victory with black Americans but potentially at the cost of losing margins with other demographics.

Then there's the terrorism issue, which wasn't a major part of the 1992, 1996, 2008, or 2012 elections and isn't an area where Clinton has a great record to sell.

Between Clinton and her husband:

-They fell on the side of Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs back in the late '90s, which had some negative results for the Serbs.

-She supported the takedown of Saddam Hussein in Iraq as a N.Y. senator, a secular dictator who kept terrorism at bay in that state.

-She initiated the takedown of Muammar Gaddafi, a secular dictator who kept terrorism at bay in Libya.

-She wants to allow more refugees from Syria into the United States.

-She favors more open borders.

Clinton's policy preferences, like those of the rest of establishment in either party, have demonstrated a clear pattern of creating greater disorder and empowerment of radical Islam abroad combined with fewer safeguards from allowing that disorder or ideology to spread domestically. They're often so caught up in playing political chess with Russia that they forget that Americans are much more concerned with the blowback of failing to address radical Islam than they are oil prices in the Balkans.

College-educated voters may not see Trump's protectionism as being necessary or helpful but many of them may feel that a Trump presidency has a greater chance of keeping them safe from the threats of increased crime or domestic terrorism. This is why the force of Trump's convention speech was assuming the mantle as the "law and order candidate."

Clinton is trying to terrify voters into believing that Trump is the next Hitler, Trump is looking to terrify voters into believing that Clinton will allow disorder to spread across the United States. When you turn on the news at night, which of those two scenarios seems more likely?

The upshot is that her play for winning big margins with that demographic is probably not strong enough to generate the needed margins of victory. Combine that with her utter lack of appeal to millennial voters and the likely decreasing margins there and you have a recipe for a Democratic disaster in November.