Donald Trump’s campaign bluntly acknowledged Sunday that the real estate mogul is trailing Hillary Clinton as the presidential race hurtles toward a close, but insisted he still has a viable path to win the White House.
With barely two weeks left and early voting underway in most of the U.S., Trump’s team said “the race is not over” and pledged to keep campaigning hard — even in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania that polls show are now trending Clinton’s way. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway laid out a path to the requisite 270 electoral votes that goes through make-or-break states Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio.
“We are behind. She has some advantages,” Conway said Sunday. Yet she argued that Clinton’s advantages — like a slew of bold-name Democrats campaigning for her — belied her lack of true support. “The current president and first lady, vice president, all are much more popular than she can hope to be.”
Added Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus: “We expect to win.”
Yet even as Clinton appeared to be strengthening her lead, her campaign was careful not to declare premature victory.
“We don’t want to get ahead of our skis here,” said Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. He said the “battleground states” where both candidates are campaigning hardest “are called that for a reason.”
As part of his closing message, Trump was laying out an ambitious agenda for his first 100 days as president. Yet he undermined his own attempt to strike a high-minded tone on policy issues when he announced in the same speech that he planned to sue the numerous women who have accused him.
“All of these liars will be sued once the election is over,” Trump said Saturday during an event near the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg. He added: “I look so forward to doing that.”
Asked about Trump’s remarks, Clinton told reporters between rallies Saturday in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that she was done responding to what her Republican opponent is saying as Election Day nears and would instead focus on helping elect other Democrats.
A day earlier, Clinton attacked Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, Pat Toomey, saying in Pittsburgh that he has refused to “stand up” to Trump as she praised his Democratic challenger, Katie McGinty. Noting Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants and his attacks on a Muslim-American military family, she said of Toomey: “If he doesn’t have the courage to stand up to Donald Trump after all of this, then can you be sure that he will stand up for you when it counts?”
Though mostly a recap of policies he’s proposed before, Trump’s speech included a few new elements, such as a freeze on hiring new federal workers and a two-year mandatory minimum sentence for immigrants who re-enter the U.S. illegally after being deported a first time. In a pledge sure to raise eyebrows on Wall Street, he said he’d block a potential merger between AT&T and media conglomerate Time Warner.
Throughout the GOP primary, Trump was criticized for shying away from detailed policy proposals. But his speech, which aides said would form the core of his closing argument to voters, underscored how the billionaire has gradually compiled a broad — if sometimes vague — policy portfolio that straddles conservative, isolationist and populist orthodoxies.
Mook and Brewer spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” and Priebus on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Conway spoke on “Fox News Sunday” and on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
(AP)
3 Responses
All Americans should wake up and vote for Donald Trump.
The liberals are disgusting. CLinto wants late term abortions….pulling a baby apart just a day or so before live birth. How can a Jew vote for that?
To no. 1: Halachah permits – or requires – an abortion to save the life of the mother. And sometimes that does not become a factor until late in the term. That’s how a Jew can vote for a pro-choice candidate, because sometimes halachah requires something that some other religions prohibit.
This late term abortion claim about pulling a baby apart days before birth is complete fiction. No one does that and no one advocates that. Ask any physician.
Both Cinton and Trump are deeply flawed candidates with Trump totally uniformed and unprepared. Why not vote for Gary Johnson?