Hillary Faces an Uphill Climb in Upstate New York

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

And she's off! Campaigning? No, at this early stage of the contest she's engaged in the latest political craze of conducting a "listening tour." Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid to fill retiring Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's seat was launched on July 7 with Hollywood-type fanfare. Three hundred journalists attended as the first lady grabbed even more media attention away from Vice President Al Gore's profile-raising exercises.

From the get-go she appears well-focused. The outcome of the Senate contest between Clinton and her most likely Republican rival, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, probably will be decided in upstate New York, the graveyard of many a liberal Democrat campaign. The state's conventional electoral wisdom has it that a statewide Republican candidacy wins if it can attract a respectable share of the vote in the Democratic city of New York. The other side of the coin is that a Democrat who can reduce GOP strength outside the Big Apple secures victory. With that presumably in mind, the first lady made a symbolic visit to the upstate farm of the outgoing Moynihan and went off on a four-day listening tour of the rural central and eastern parts of the state.

The latest polls suggest that Clinton will have to work hard in upstate New York during the next 16 months if she wants to succeed Moynihan. Recent polls suggest that her initial 12-point upstate lead in February has turned into a 13-point lead for the mayor. The first lady appears to be holding up well in New York City, but Giuliani has the advantages of incumbency and therefore is well-positioned to come out with a few surprises that could, at the last minute of the race, squeeze some extra votes for his bid.

At least one Republican political consultant muses that Hillary also could have an October Surprise up her sleeve: "Say she is trailing Rudy by six or eight points in the waning days of the contest. How could she turn that around? One way would be to announce that she's finally had enough of her husband -- the ditch-Bill option, I call it. That would bring back all the sympathy many felt for her at the height of the Lewinsky scandal and may counter a bit her negatives."