It was the Wednesday after Labor Day when Robby Mook and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and chairman, sat down at the headquarters of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington for some blunt talk.
One by one, Sens. Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Jon Tester went around the table and delivered variations of the same message: “We need more money,” said the Senate Democratic leaders, according to three people briefed on the meeting. The ask was for a minimum of $5 million — and preferably more in their quest to take back the Senate.
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“What they had proposed up to that point was insufficient,” said a top Senate Democratic adviser, saying Clinton’s team had promised little in cash and instead argued “their field operation should be considered an in-kind donation.” The same day, Mook and Podesta sat for a similar meeting at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan where they also asked for $5 million.
Money soon came — though half as much as requested. The Democratic National Committee transferred $2.5 million to the DSCC, and another $2.5 million to the DCCC.
A source close to the Clinton campaign said those transfers were only part of the story of her down ballot help, saying the campaign had decided recently against “skimming off the top” of spending in three states where the campaign believes it is comfortably ahead — Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Nevada — and instead increased its spending on get-out-the-vote and other efforts there solely to boost Senate candidates who are lagging behind Clinton in the polls.
Still, back in early September, tensions between Capitol Hill Democrats and Clinton’s Brooklyn-based campaign had been simmering for months — sometimes over money but more often about Clinton’s message and the fact that she insisted on defining Trump as separate from, rather than a creature of the modern Republican Party.
And three days after the Mook and Podesta meetings, when Clinton’s campaign unveiled a new ad, those tensions boiled over.
The spot, which aired nationally on cable and in six battleground states, featured a half dozen sitting GOP lawmakers criticizing Trump. “Unfit. Dangerous. Even for Republicans,” read the text on the closing screen.
Why was Clinton, congressional Democrats fumed, promoting current Republican lawmakers as paragons of good judgement — Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Reid Ribble, Richard Hanna — members of the same GOP Congress that Democrats had spent years painting as extremist?
“You just don’t need to go there,” said a top House Democratic adviser. “It was a selfish strategy.”
Now, with Trump imploding after a tape emerged of him making lewd comments about grabbing women, the reasons to “go there” are even less pressing than before. As Clinton has surged to a substantial lead in the polls — Trump trailed by as much as 14 points in one national head-to-head survey this week, and was only barely ahead in another in the Senate battleground of Missouri — she and congressional Democrats are entering the final four-week sprint more in sync than ever as she focuses not just on winning the White House but the Congress too.
“There’s been vast improvement in the last week,” said the same House Democratic adviser.
The question now is whether it’s too late. After spending the summer — and particularly the Democratic National Convention — trying to split Republicans from Trump, can Clinton spend the next month effectively tying them back together?
“We believe that even as these Republicans defect in large numbers from Trump that they played a major role in propping him up in the campaign prior to now,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. “In the coming weeks, we intend to hold those down-ballot Republican accountable.”
Clinton’s fellow Democrats wanted her to start far sooner. As far back as March, Reid had outlined how he wanted to frame the fall campaign, when he delivered a speech at the Center for American Progress that tried to inextricably tie together Trumpism and Republicanism.
“The Republican establishment acts bewildered,” Reid said then. “But they shouldn’t. As much as they may try to distance themselves from Trump now, Republican leaders are responsible for his rise.”
But in Brooklyn, Clinton’s campaign team had different plans, even though Clinton had spoken similarly to Reid before Trump clinched the nomination. They wanted to paint Trump as unhinged, unfit and, more controversially among Democratic officials, un-Republican. A strong top of the ticket, they preached to jittery congressional Democrats, would lift all down-ballot Democrats.
A Clinton campaign official noted that the $5 million the DNC transferred to the congressional committees was $5 million more than President Obama gave away four years ago. Plus, this official said the campaign was helping through the so-called “coordinated campaign,” including target House and Senate candidates on the phone scripts of the hundreds of thousands of volunteer calls and literature pieces in battleground states.
But many Democratic officials wanted Clinton to use Trump to define the entire GOP.
In May, the DNC press secretary wrote his boss that Clinton’s “campaign does not want to connect Trump and the Republican Party,” according to hacked DNC emailed released by Wikileaks.
“I think that's crazy,” DNC communications director Luis Miranda
wrote back.
In another email chain, Miranda wrote to the party’s then-CEO that Clinton’s team had “been asking us to disaggregate Trump from down ballot Republicans…they don’t want us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal.”
“So they want us to embrace the ‘Republicans fleeing Trump’ side, but not hold down ballot GOPers accountable,” Miranda wrote. “That’s a problem."
Now there are signs that Clinton is changing her approach.
In recent days, the purse strings are showing signs of loosening as her super PAC, Priorities USA, is
openly considering redirecting its ad reservations in four battleground states — New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — into ads for Senate Democratic challengers. Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, is mixing in swipes at Republican Senate candidates in her gaggles aboard Clinton’s campaign plane, frequently singling out Nevada's Joe Heck and New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte. And Clinton herself has begun calling out Republican candidates in sharper rebukes on the stump while elevating their challengers more than she has in the past.
To Senate Democrats, it's a sign that she's no longer as nervous about having to work with the sitting GOP senators, and that she sees a real opening to beat them.
“It is unacceptable, it is an unacceptable response for Marco Rubio, when asked about climate change to say, ‘I’m not a scientist,’” Clinton said Tuesday in Florida. “Well, why doesn’t he ask a scientist?” Clinton name-dropped Rubio’s Democratic challenger three separate times in her speech after he appeared at one of her rallies for the first time. “I hope that you’ll elect Patrick Murphy.”
On Wednesday, in Pueblo, Colorado, among Clinton’s introducers was Gail Schwartz, the Democratic challenger in the congressional district where the rally was held. Schwartz got a shout-out from Clinton herself, too — a rare occasion, especially in a House race where Democrats see their challenger as the underdog.
A second senior House Democratic strategist said there are ongoing talks for Clinton to begin calling out vulnerable House Republicans in swing states who have tried to distance themselves from Trump — such as Rep. Barbara Comstock in Virginia, Mike Coffman in Colorado and Carlos Curbelo in Florida. Those denunciations, in turn, can be flipped into TV ads, a tactic that would also be welcome to Senate Democratic operatives hoping to see more of it from Team Clinton.
“As we all make our closing arguments, there’s a real opportunity for aligning the messaging,” the strategist said.
Already this week, Palmieri herself said aboard Clinton’s plane that Republican leaders “helped legitimize” Trump.
"In Nevada, Congressman Heck, having supported Trump initially, then walked away from him. He's one of the leaders that, certainly before we learned about Access Hollywood, had evidence to believe Trump was unfit to be president but continued to prop him up," she said as the campaign made its way to Las Vegas on Wednesday.
It's a relief for Democrats both professionally and personally.
House Democrats have an unusually strong ally inside the Clinton campaign in Mook, who previously ran the DCCC. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have particularly close ties to the Clinton super PAC, which is run by the former DSCC executive director Guy Cecil, along with about multiple other top DSCC veterans.
Still, there are undisguised strains between the two sides over how long it took the campaign to make the turn: there was little formal communication between those working to reclaim the Senate majority and Clinton's camp in the 48 hours after Trump's implosion, even as the campaign sent smoke signals about its change in tack.
“Part of their pushback has been, especially on Ryan, they believe that the linking of Republicans to Trump isn’t going to be successful,” said one of the senior House Democratic advisers. “But that’s our call to make, not theirs. That’s our races. That’s something we’ve felt for a long time is key, and now that’s the reality.”
So even something so small as when Clinton
tweeted this week that “Ryan is still endorsing Trump” after news broke that Ryan wasn’t willing to defend the nominee anymore was cheered at the DCCC’s headquarters. It was linking the two Republicans, not separating them.
As another senior adviser involved in Senate races described it “tension lessened” steadily in part because of just “how crazy” Trump was. “It became harder to argue ‘Pat Toomey is Donald Trump’ or ‘Kelly Ayotte is Donald Trump,’” this Democrat said. “It’s not that they are doing the exact same thing. It’s that they so worried about saving themselves that they are unwilling to break from Trump when he’s done any one of outrageous things.”
Of course, jumping in the polls has a way of mollifying disagreements. Internal DCCC polling matches the public survey this week from NBC that showed voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans on a generic ballot by a whopping 7-point margin.
“The better she does,” the Senate Democratic adviser said, “the better we’re going to do.”
But if they’ve come to terms, more or less, on their final month of messaging, there is still the matter of money — the perennial effort of congressional leaders, typically unsuccessful, to wring more cash from their presidential nominee.
Clinton entered October with as much cash at her disposal as any candidate in history and is not done raising money: her fundraising schedule has sticking to her campaign cash hunt through at least October 25, according to invitations obtained by POLITICO.
And Clinton's campaign has avoided instructing fundraisers to begin distributing their cash down-ballot: "not gonna happen," said one bundler close to the finance team in Brooklyn, insisting that Clinton's Hillary Victory Fund was designed to pump money into coordinated campaigns in the states that include House and Senate races.
But the down ballot races are still starved for cash.
“These house races are so expensive because they’re in suburban media markets,” said the House Democratic strategist. “We are limited only by our budget.”
