WASHINGTON — Democrats say Hillary Clinton has nothing to fear about recent polls showing the race between her and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tightening or revelations of how she handled classified information.
A new CNN/ORC poll shows Clinton lost much of her post convention bounce, but Democrats contend that the former Secretary of State is doing better on average and in key states than Trump.
“If you take an average of all the polls that are out there, she’s up by six. That happens to every candidate often after the convention,” Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro told The Daily Caller Wednesday. “Mr. Trump went up. Hillary Clinton was up for a much longer period of time, but you take the average of all the polls that are out there. She is up by six and this election is going to be overwhelming.”
Former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz agreed telling TheDC, “I don’t think she lost her bounce. If you look at the state by state polling, at the Electoral College map, she’s in a very strong position. This is a very close race.”
“We’re going to have to out organize and out-mobilize the Trump campaign—besides the fact that he is the most extreme and misogynistic and bigoted candidate a major party has ever put forward, this is gonna be critical in terms of running an effective grassroots organized campaign which I think she is well on her way to doing,” Wasserman Schultz said.
Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski also believes the momentum is in Clinton’s favor.
“I think Hillary Clinton is doing a great job She is substantially ahead. She is ahead in the battleground states and we’re convinced she will keep her momentum. She’s not losing momentum,” Mikulski said on Tuesday.
Prior to Congress returning to Washington from a seven week recess, Clinton dealt with several days of bad news, including stories about how she and her once State Department personnel responded to questions from the FBI about how she and her staff mishandled classified information.
According to notes taken by the FBI during her interview with the agency, Clinton said she believed that “c” marked documents were related to alphabetizing the information as opposed to “confidential.” Additionally, Clinton used at least eight separate BlackBerries, some of which were bought on eBay, that were never given to her by the State Department and some were later smashed with a hammer.
“I just can’t believe that this is not some form of obstruction of justice, when you’re destroying technology that houses information that’s been requested by Congress. The Justice Department clearly is not going to do anything,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told TheDC Tuesday.
Graham explained, “It’s sad, but I think the Obama Justice Department is not remotely going to do anything about it and you’re setting a new standard here for public officials to follow, and I think if you’re a military member or worked in the normal chains of government you would be in trouble, based on what she did.”
Republican Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence jabbed Clinton over the emails, alluding to former President Richard Nixon on Tuesday telling attendees at a campaign stop in Missouri: “You know, it was a long time ago when I was still a boy that I remember a president who deleted eighteen and a half minutes of tape and was held accountable for that. And now, Hillary Clinton deleted almost eighteen thousand emails. That doesn’t look like politics, folks, that looks like obstruction and the American people are sick and tired of it.”
FBI Director James Comey defended his agency’s work in a letter Wednesday saying in part that the case against Clinton and her staff “not a cliff-hanger” because it was “really not prosecutable.”
Democrats pointed to Comey and his agency’s exoneration of Clinton as a reason why no one should feel that Clinton got away with anything.
“I have great faith in Director Comey and let’s be honest. He was blunt in saying she was extremely careless, but he found no reason for further investigation or criminal action,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin told TheDC Wednesday.
Durbin added, “I don’t know if members of Congress could pass this test about e-mails between their official accounts and personal accounts. Comey’s made his report that ought to be the end of it, but since it’s an election year I’m sure it’ll continue.”
Like Durbin, Mikulski also believes that Clinton’s position of power did not giver her a free pass with the FBI.
“My understanding was that Sec. Clinton cooperated with the FBI investigation. The FBI published their report. Let the report stand on its own,” Mikulski said.
“I think she continues to explain [the FBI investigation.] She has to and she will,” DeLauro said, noting that Trump still needs to answer questions about a Trump University investigation in Florida. “I saw him in an interview last night where he says, ‘I give lots of money to a lot of candidates and then when I call them up in a couple of years they return the favor. I mean, my God, what are we talking about in terms of pay to play?’’ she said.
“Hillary Clinton has been relentlessly attacked for 40 years, and when I am talking to voters across my state or across the country, they’re telling me ‘I want to know what is the candidate for president that I vote for is going to do about making sure I do a good job that pays me well and making sure that I have someone who is gonna preserve the retirement safety net that I count on’–Those are the kinds of things that people are going to cast their ballots on—not emails or any of this really unwarranted extraneous political stuff,” Wasserman Schultz said.