2016 Can Clinton keep her head down? With 20 days to go and a win in sight, the Democrat just needs to survive her final fight with Trump.

LAS VEGAS — Hillary Clinton’s favorite way to abuse a lead is to take her foot off the gas pedal and coast. This time, as the campaign confidently expands into red states with just three weeks to go, it’s a tendency her team actually wants her to indulge in the final, bitter face-off against Donald Trump.

The goal for Clinton, according to a longtime aide, is to make Trump “shadowbox” his way through the 90-minute session Wednesday night — by keeping her head down and avoiding direct confrontation as he hurls personal and Wiki-related attacks in her direction.


“She has control of this race,” said Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “She should stay within herself … and resist the temptation to trade insults with Trump.”

Unlike at the previous two debates, the Clinton team is not making any pre-debate predictions that a kinder, gentler Trump might show up on the Las Vegas Strip for the final hurrah. Instead, they are raising expectations that the Republican, sensing nothing to lose, will throw every dirty punch possible.

“We are not expecting Trump to even try to seem presidential, and it would be too late even if he did,” said Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon. “She will be ready for whatever scorched-earth tactics he tries out. He clearly thinks he did well in the second debate — but his mistake is thinking that rallying his core supporters is a winning strategy. He only further alienated persuadable voters.”

Clinton, meanwhile, is trying to use the last appearance before a multimillion-viewer audience to do something other than tussle with Trump. Her team is eager to see her land a few lines that convey an aspirational message in what’s otherwise been the darkest presidential contest in modern American politics.

“Clinton should hammer away at Trump’s unfitness, but priority one for this final debate is to make the compelling case for her candidacy,” said Jonathan Cowan, a former Clinton White House aide who is now head of the centrist think tank Third Way. “She has a shot at being the first Democrat in decades to win college-educated voters, and she must focus on closing that sale Wednesday night.”

Her team is, indeed, hoping to pick up those voters, especially any newly alienated conservatives eager to flee Trump. Clinton is not even staying overnight in Vegas, instead flying back to Chappaqua to begin the final 19-day sprint to Election Day.

Indeed, if her goal is to keep a low profile on the stage Wednesday night, it’s to raise it everywhere that matters in the following days. Over the next week, she plans to travel to major battlegrounds in which Trump was leading just a few short weeks ago; she will be in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Florida in the next week.

But first she has to get through the unpleasantness of the Chris Wallace-moderated showdown. Clinton operatives flying into Las Vegas on Tuesday said they expected the debate conversation to devolve beyond where it landed last week in St. Louis, where Trump used Bill Clinton as a human shield to defend himself against his own bragging about kissing and groping women without consent — and invited three of the former president’s accusers from the '90s to sit front row in the auditorium.

(This time, Trump has invited Obama’s half-brother, Malik Obama.)

Clinton officials blame the brain trust of Breitbart executive Steve Bannon and veteran GOP operative David Bossie, both running Trump’s strategy, for the tenor of the second debate — they have convinced Trump to “aggressively prosecute a set of 1990s-era attacks against the Clintons,” Fallon said. “But that is a strategy for a primary campaign, not a general.”

Since then, Trump has also accused Hillary Clinton of being on drugs before the second debate and said the two candidates should be submitted to a drug test before the final showdown. “I don’t know what’s going on with her,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire. “She was all pumped at the beginning, and at the end it was like, ‘Oh, take me down.’ She could barely reach her car.”

It’s not the kind of conversation Clinton’s expert team of debate preppers was originally expecting in a tight general election.

Speaking to reporters on board Clinton’s plane to Las Vegas on Tuesday afternoon, Palmieri said that in the first two showdowns, “there wasn't as much focus on policy as she would like because of how Donald Trump uses his time.”

And that has fundamentally shifted how Clinton goes about her marathon debate prep sessions. Back in March, Clinton was planning on peppering her debate against Bernie Sanders with some early Trump attack lines.

Clinton "wanted some good Trump hits, and we've thought of the fact that he opposed the auto bailout, and Trump University,” Clinton aide Sarah Solow emailed the debate prep team on March 4, ahead of one of Clinton’s marathon prep sessions (the email was released on WikiLeaks, among thousands of hacked emails from campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal account).

But those were the more innocent days of early spring, when the Clinton campaign was still focused on the policy positions of the potential Republican nominee, which might hurt him with voters in the Rust Belt.

Now the campaign is expecting more of the personal. And that prep work tends to happen in a smaller group of trusted aides. In a schedule for debate prep sent to her team by Ron Klain last spring, a portion titled “review the sensitive WJC related questions” was proposed for a smaller group only, liked a closed set (just Podesta, senior aide Jake Sullivan, debate prep leader Karen Dunn and longtime adviser Mandy Grunwald) in the privacy of Clinton’s Chappaqua home.

Progressives, meanwhile, are hoping that Clinton will assuage any fears that have recently popped up in the emails stolen from Podesta, released daily by WikiLeaks. Those emails included comments she gave behind closed doors to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, and have raised questions among progressives about her commitment to causes championed by Sanders.

“It would be good politics and good policy for her to get more specific on some of the issues of the day when it comes to Wall Street,” said Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party. “She should say she is for closing the CEO bonus loophole. She should really distinguish herself from this phony guy she’s about to defeat.”

Added Democratic consultant Rebecca Katz, a former top adviser to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio: “After the drip, drip of the Podesta emails, the left needs a shot in the arm. Clinton needs to say something meaningful to the Bernie voters and the 'maybe' voters that gets them to the polls.”

But other Democratic strategists said she should just shrug it all off and trudge on. “I would just hold fast to the public positions she has taken,” said Axelrod, “and tell people what they mean for them.”