Politico
By Glenn Thrush
March 14, 2016
Joel Benenson is a world-class worrier, but he isn’t especially worried about Donald Trump in the fall.
Trump
isn't just freaking out Republicans these days -- Democrats, panicked
by his unstoppable rise in the primaries, see him as an ochre ogre
capable of undoing Barack Obama's legacy and
undermining the civility supporting American democracy.
Trump-phobia
has infected many people in Hillary Clinton’s extended orbit –
especially her notoriously jelly-kneed donors — and they are dutifully
fretting over Trump’s dark-alley debate
style, his promise to napalm the Clintons with personal attacks and,
above all, his magical-realism appeal to angry Rust Belt whites.
Benenson,
the Clinton campaign’s bearded principal pollster and chief strategist,
can't even bring himself to pay lip-service to Trump, whom he sees as a
one-man Democratic turnout machine
and a turn-off switch to moderates in both parties. His analysis of the
2016 landscape leads him to this conclusion that Trump has virtually no
path to the presidency (He
won't say the same thing about Bernie Sanders) and Trump presents
Clinton with renewed opportunities in purple states – especially North
Carolina and Arizona.
Indeed,
when I interviewed him for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast on Friday,
the typically easygoing Benenson was in a tense and testy mood, bracing
for an uncertain battle against Bernie
Sanders on Tuesday – lashing the Vermont senator for impugning
Clinton’s character. Yet when I mentioned Trump — specifically the
developer’s claim he could swipe New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the lot from the Democrats — his
Charlie Brown cloud lifted instantly.
“It’s
not real,” a grinning Benenson said of Trump’s repeated claim he can
defeat Clinton (or Sanders) by wrestling away swing-state voters.
“I
don’t see any state that Democrats have won five out of six times, or
six out of six times, that Trump, you know, at face value, poses a
threat in. I just don’t see it,” said Benenson,
who was the top pollster in Barack Obama’s two successful presidential
campaigns.
“What’s
the evidence of it? The evidence of it, they’ve turned out a lot of
people. I think he’s broken 50 percent in only one state, right? … If
you look at the states that Democrats have
won… in five out of the last six [presidential contests], it adds up to
257 electoral votes. It means you only need 13 more to get to 270 if we
perform that way.”
Other
Obama alumni — including ’08 campaign manager David Plouffe — are
basically on the same page, although they think Trump’s unpredictability
(coupled with Clinton’s innate caution as
a candidate) could cause unexpected problems. Benenson said he hasn’t
polled extensively on Trump yet but he thinks Trump has so antagonized
minority voters — and turned off moderate whites with his harsh rhetoric
and chaotic rallies — that Clinton might exceed
Obama’s 2012 total of 332 Electoral College votes.
North
Carolina, which Obama won narrowly in ’08 and lost by 2 percent four
years later, would likely be target number one in a Clinton-Trump
showdown. “That’s going to be a very problematic
state for Republicans,” he said. “Now, we played there in 2012, but not
a lot. The president didn't go into the state. We let Romney outspend
us 5 to 1.”
It
would be nice to have the luxury of focusing exclusively on Trump (or,
better still, concocting a game plan against Ted Cruz, the Clinton
camp’s preferred opponent). But there’s the small
matter of clearing aside Sanders, who has a front-runner’s online
fundraising operation and a terrier-with-teeth-in-your-leg competitive
tenacity that could keep him in the fight until the convention.
A
couple of weeks ago, Clinton’s team was very confident she was close to
wrapping up the nomination. But when I asked Benenson to look ahead to
Tuesday’s big five-state contest, he hit the
basic talking points: She was ahead by 215 pledged delegates, a bigger
lead in that category than Obama ever enjoyed in 08. And he demurred
when I asked if Clinton would emerge with a “substantial” net delegate
gain for the night. “Substantial?” he said. “There
are a lot of delegates. Like I said, if there are 867 out there – I
don’t know how we’ll be measuring substantial by the end of the night,
and I can’t forecast it, because some of these states are closer than
others.”
Like
everybody else, Benenson was a bit blind-sided by Sanders’ stunning win
in Michigan last week (Brooklyn’s data team predicted a five-point
Clinton win – public pollsters had Sanders
losing by three or four times that margin). Moreover, it’s no secret
that he’s struggled (along with the candidate herself) to sharpen
Clinton’s sprawling competence-and-policy-mastery platform into a
compact, inspirational, bumper-stickery message to compete
with Sanders’ anti-Wall Street crusade. Reports of friction between him
and the Clintons have been overstated, he told me.
“You
know, she’s been on the road more and I’m here more in New York and
Brooklyn,” said Benenson, the highest-ranking member of Clinton’s team
who hadn’t worked with her on previous campaigns.
“But I think we’ve gotten to know each other more. We talk very
frankly. She knows I speak my mind; I’m somebody who does, and I think
that works for her… I like it when we’re doing debate prep and there’s a
lot of back-and-forth, and you’re hearing her talk.
She’s often the one who comes up with the best things because they come
from what she's believed for a long time, and I think it’s a pretty
powerful place to be. I think this is a woman who knows who she is,
knows why she's doing this.”
Benenson
is protective of Clinton and has, not surprisingly, cultivated a
not-inconsiderable disdain for Sanders and his sharp-elbowed team. “He’s
been in the free media, been leveling very
— and the whole campaign has been leveling very explicit attacks on
Secretary Clinton. He’s tried to impugn her character,” he said, his
voice rising to a near shout. “He does it all the time. He does it, you
know, in a way that has given him enough wiggle
room to say, ‘No, no, I’m not being negative,’ but of course he is. His
whole campaign.”
Sanders’ criticisms of Benenson’s former boss, Obama, are especially galling. Walk into his 33rd-floor office in Midtown Manhattan and you’ll find a mini-museum full of first-rate ’08 ephemera: The conference room is festooned with “Obama Wins” newspaper headlines, and a cardboard cut-out of the 44th president stares back at you benevolently as you sit on the waiting room couch.
“The
things he says about Barack Obama… It actually pisses me off… because
it’s disingenuous,” Benenson said, flashing real anger. “Don’t stand on a
stage in front of television cameras,
with millions of people when you’re running in a Democratic primary and
say he’s a friend of yours and you work with him.”
“You
know, I’d like to remind everybody what he said when Barack Obama was
under attack by Republicans running for reelection in 2012, when he
called [Obama] weak, a disappointment to millions
of people, and said he didn’t have the backbone to stand up to
Republicans,” he said, suggesting Sanders is more comfortable slamming
his allies than the common enemy. “I haven’t heard him say a word about
George Bush. Have you even heard him mention George
Bush’s name on the campaign trail?”
The
contempt, in many ways, is born of familiarity. Benenson, like Sanders,
is an overachieving outer-borough working-class Jew who was drawn to
progressive political causes early in his
life. Both had peripatetic young adulthoods that didn’t portend
powerful futures on the national stage. Sanders college-hopped,
abandoning his native Brooklyn for bucolic Vermont where he earned a
living as a carpenter, writer, filmmaker and freelance gadfly
before winning the Burlington mayor’s race as a socialist.
Benenson,
who looks a decade younger than his 63 years, took an even more
circuitous path. He dropped out of Queens College, just short of
graduation, to work in avant-garde theater. Then,
to pay his rent, he accepted an uncle’s offer to help run a beer
distributorship in Crown Heights Brooklyn. And that’s where he spent the
night of the 1977 New York City blackout – staked out at the front
door, a shotgun borrowed from his girlfriend’s brother
loaded on his lap. Then he wanted to become a Yankees beat reporter,
which eventually led to a successful career as a political scribe for
the New York Daily News.
His is a rarity in the media-suspicious world of the Clintons: Many of his oldest friends are reporters – Adam Nagourney of the
Times, Roger Simon of POLITICO, Serge Kovaleski (the
Times-man whose disability Trump mocked at a rally), and Obama message
man David Axelrod, who made his name at the
Chicago Tribune.
Like
Sanders, who was arrested for participating in a civil rights
demonstration as a student in 1960s Chicago, Benenson had his own brush
with protest and the police. In 1970, a day after
the Kent State shootings, a 17-year-old Benenson was (in his words)
“detained” after joining a group of anti-Vietnam protesters who blocked
the heavily-trafficked Long Island Expressway.
But
their paths diverged in ways that say much about the character of each
man and each campaign. While Sanders spent most of his teens and
twenties as an activist for socialist and student
organizations, Benenson was attracted to mainstream Democratic
politics. His hero was Bobby Kennedy, and he casts the New York
senator’s 1968 campaign as the hybrid of idealism and pragmatism
currently embodied by his 2016 boss.
In
our interview, Benenson started to talk about Kennedy matter-of-factly,
but he broke down as he described watching TV coverage of Martin Luther
King’s assassination in his parent’s Jackson
Heights living room. He remembers the image of Kennedy, jumping on top
of a parked car to address a seething African-American crowd in
Indianapolis. “What we need in the United States is not division,”
Kennedy said. “What we need in the United States is not
hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or
lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”
“That,” Benenson said, “was powerful.”
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