Matthews said, female voters viewed attacks on Hillary Clinton’s spouse as “inherently unfair. Ultimately, it came back down to this: Bill Clinton’s not the one who’s running.”
When it came to criticizing Hillary Clinton as an enabler, Matthews said, the reaction was, “yeah, you’re angry. It’s a normal reaction. Any line of messaging on this generates sympathy for her, or voters said it was completely irrelevant.”
The women in the America Rising focus group also identified areas they would consider off-limits in terms of Clinton attacks: “It was her age, her stamina, her health and her looks,” Matthews recalled.
.. With 26 days to go in the race, Donald Trump has said he plans to launch a full-scale attack on the former president. “We’re going to turn Bill [Clinton] into Bill Cosby,” his campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Bloomberg News earlier this week.
.. On Thursday night, Sean Hannity plans to feature three of Bill Clinton’s accusers: Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. And Trump’s campaign has promised new revelations from previously unknown women.
.. But Democratic allies are thrilled with the politically nonsensical narrative.
.. Brock called it “a giant exercise in projection. If there’s a Bill Cosby here, it will turn out to be Donald Trump, not Bill Clinton.”
.. in Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, her operatives found that suburban women in New York disliked Clinton because of her decision to stay with her husband.
.. the campaign chose not to address the issue head-on, focusing instead on working-class women upstate, who viewed Hillary Clinton as a champion.
.. Democrats close to Clinton speculated that the individuals guiding Trump’s strategy, like Bannon, are most likely focused on what will happen after Nov. 8 — and empowering the Trump base to become a movement of anti-Clinton opposition, whether it’s through a media operation or a grass-roots movement.
.. the biggest problem with the attacks, some Clinton allies said, was the source:
Trump’s Hill surrogates: Stop attacking Ryan
Trump blasted Ryan during a Florida rally Wednesday — just the latest in a series of attacks aimed at the House speaker in recent days — accusing the Wisconsin Republican and other GOP leaders of turning their backs on him because “there’s a whole sinister deal going on.”
But just hours before on a conference call among several dozen Trump Hill surrogates and Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, several lawmakers argued that criticizing Ryan isn’t productive, according to a source on the call who is close to the campaign.
.. the focus needs to be on why Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are different; not fighting between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan,’” the source recalled. “The focus of our efforts need to be on the enemy, not self-inflicted fire.”
.. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), who voted for Ryan on the House floor earlier this year, tweeted that he’d withdraw support for the speaker over the recent spat with Trump.
.. Trump warned supporters “this is the last time you’ll ever have a chance to save our country,” going on to criticize Ryan and other party leaders for not reaching out after Sunday’s presidential debate.
.. Trump also took a shot at Ryan’s leadership position on the Bill O’Reilly show Tuesday night, implying that he might not be House speaker next year if the real estate tycoon wins the White House. But it was unclear exactly how Trump thought Ryan would be removed.
.. Many members, even if they don’t like the idea of abandoning the GOP nominee, understand the precarious position Trump continues to put Ryan in
Let’s Hear From a Deplorable
“I’ve been waiting for him to grow up,’’ she told me tonight. “At the debate I saw how Hillary needled him and got under his skin and after all these months, if he hasn’t been able to control that, I don’t feel that he’d be able to control it in the White House.
.. She did not consider the “Access Hollywood” tape a deal-breaker about returning to Trump.
“I think it was disgusting but it was more bluster,’’ she said. “He wanted to seem like ‘the guy’ with Billy Bush. I still believe in my heart that half of what he says and does is just bravado to make him look bigger and better. Somewhere along the line, he got an inferiority complex. He’s all mixed up.
.. And when the video of Trump’s bizarre St. Louis press conference before the debate with several of the women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault hit the Internet, Peggy thought that was a “totally high school move” by Trump.
“I think it will cause women to feel sympathetic to Hillary,’’ Peggy said, shaking her head. “It will remind them of what she’s had to go through with Bill. Bill is not running for office. Maybe Hillary did enable at some point, but I think that was for survival.
.. When she pulled that Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, she really believed his lies, that he had never been involved.”
.. “I think he did really well,’’ Peggy said. “He has done what the Republicans criticized him for not doing in the first debate, attacking her on Libya and the emails.
.. I like the way he walked around to stay in the picture when Hillary was talking.
.. In the end, my conservative sister concluded: “I could see him as president.’’
The Munchkin Theory of Donald Trump
Kellyanne Conway was known in political circles for a catchphrase: “marriage, munchkins, mortgage and mutual funds.” It’s not as memorable as Trump’s “You’re fired,” but it represented a powerful argument: Women who were liberal when young would become more conservative — and become reliable Republican voters — as they formed families and became homeowners and investors.