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Clinton's goal: Erase Trump's advantage on the economy

It’s the critical issue in this election and one that has ultimately determined nearly all recent elections.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally at Abraham Lincoln High School, in Des Moines, Iowa, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016.

Hillary Clinton has a singular goal as she lands in Detroit on Thursday to deliver a major economic address: Erase what’s left of Donald Trump’s once-significant decisive advantage on the economy.

It’s the critical issue in this election and one that has ultimately determined nearly all recent elections, as her husband’s former campaign adviser, James Carville, explained in 1992 when he coined the phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

While Clinton has spent considerable time painting Trump as a shady businessman who jilts contractors and outsources his own product lines for overseas production, her challenge is condensing her own message into a simple idea that resonates with voters, said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who conducts the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

“The economy is a jump ball from my point of view,” said Hart.

Following a mostly successful convention and bus tour through economically depressed pockets of Ohio and Pennsylvania, Clinton is shaving Trump’s lead on the economy, from 10 points in June to 4 points in the most recent NBC poll. Overall, Trump has been fishtailing in surveys since the party conventions last month, with Clinton now up around 8 points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics rolling average of polls.

“In order for Hillary Clinton to take advantage of it, she’s going to have to have a few clear specifics that come under one umbrella idea,” Hart said, regarding Clinton's task on framing her economic argument. “When that happens, it begins to change for the Democrats. If it doesn’t, she leaves that vulnerability open for Donald Trump.”

Coming to Warren

Clinton has never tried to hide her policy-wonk nature. And certainly the plan to boost jobs and the economy that she'll present Thursday is replete with detailed programs and policy prescriptions.

Her speech Thursday afternoon in Warren is expected to draw heavily on her $125-billion Economic Revitalization Initiative plan, available at her website hillaryclinton.com. That plan offers proposals to deal with everything from youth employment and jobs for returning prison inmates to working capital for entrepreneurs, billions of dollars for infrastructure repairs, and more.

The plan is expected to add 321,000 jobs to Michigan's workforce and 10.4 million jobs across the nation through 2020, the campaign said Wednesday. Those numbers come from an analysis of her plan by Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody's.

These and a multitude of other proposals aim at ground-level support for the nitty-gritty of the American economy — support for both workers and their employers through loans, grants, stronger union organizing rights, a higher minimum wage and access to high-speed broadband.

Clinton's plan includes new money to pay for public transit programs, including bike and pedestrian lanes in cities. There would be funds for blight removal to make urban neighborhoods more attractive to employers. The plan would provide incubators, mentoring and training for 50,000 entrepreneurs and small business owners in underserved communities.

Clinton will present her economic plan Thursday afternoon in a by-invitation address at Futuramic Tool and Engineering, which is headquartered in Warren and started out in 1955 as an auto supplier. The firm more recently has pivoted to the aerospace industry, helping the military with the F35 fighter jet.

A more recent venture into space has gotten Futuramic more attention. The company is working with NASA to help manufacture the SLS Rocket Booster that will be used on a future manned space mission to Mars.

“It’s a fantastic story. They took an old tennis and racquetball facility and turned it into an automotive plant,” said John Paul Rea, director of the Macomb County Economic Development Department. “And now they’re building a rocket that is going to take a man to Mars."

Noting that Trump as well as former Democratic contender Bernie Sanders have also visited Warren, Rea added, "This just proves that what we’re doing here matters on a national agenda. We’re not only driving a technological revolution, but we’re revamping our workforce. And that should be celebrated.”

Perception issues

One challenge for Clinton is the perception, particularly among many working-class voters, that because Trump is a successful real estate businessman, he knows how to create jobs. And despite positive news on jobs gains in recent months, it's a challenge that could be further complicated by recent economic reports showing sluggish growth this year, which Republicans are pinning on President Barack Obama. The U.S. economy grew only 1% in the first half of 2016, well below the historic average of over 3%.

Clinton is promising the biggest investment in U.S. jobs — including infrastructure, precision manufacturing and green energy — since World War II. Trump says he’ll bring back jobs, including in the coal industry, that once supported a solid middle-class lifestyle, and he’s blasting the bipartisan trade agreements that many working-class voters blame for job losses.

“A Trump administration will end this war on the American worker and unleash an energy revolution that will bring vast new wealth to our country,” Trump told the Detroit Economic Club on Monday.

On Thursday, Clinton will also be in Detroit, where she’ll offer a rebuttal to Trump’s approach, which includes a moratorium on federal business regulations and overhauling the tax code, including an end to the estate tax.

In the past couple of days, she has previewed her argument against the GOP nominee, including a new video stating that Trump’s plan offers huge tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans and the largest corporations. Ending the estate tax would bust the nation’s federal budget while benefiting the richest families, including a $4-billion break for Trump’s family, the Clinton campaign argues, and a child-care tax deduction that would also redound mostly to the benefit of well-to-do families that itemize their annual tax returns.

She has also taken aim at his proposal to eliminate the so-called carried interest loophole, which she says would be replaced by an even bigger tax advantage for hedge fund managers and private equity executives under his plan to streamline the income tax code into three brackets.

“They tried to make his old, tired ideas sound new,” Clinton said in a Monday speech in Florida, in which she contended that Trump is simply repackaging “trickle-down” economics that weights tax policy to the favor of the wealthy on the theory that it flows down to everyone else.

Simple ideas vs. the fine print

Democrats say Clinton has yet to pull into the lead on the economy in part because of the U.S. electorate’s distaste for policy details and fine print versus more simple ideas and messages.

“People look at Trump and think he’s rich and think he can run the economy,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “It’s hard to break through with her message because Trump takes up so much of the oxygen."

Still, when it comes to the middle class and who they think “is going to help me,” said Mellman, Clinton has a wide lead. And in this election, where voters are paying close attention to issues of temperament and character, that could be a more important number, he said.

Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, said Clinton is making inroads with critical Republican constituencies, including white, college-educated women in the latest round of polling. And even though she may not be able to make a big dent with Trump’s white, working-class base, she’ll continue to crisscross the Rust Belt.

“This isn’t just a political calculation,” she said. “People who don’t live in those areas still want to see those areas improve.”

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