Splashed across social media and the airwaves, the photos are hard to miss.

Follow Hillary Clinton’s Instagram feed, and you’ll see her as a toddler in Park Ridge, Illinois, riding a tricycle. On Facebook, you’ll meet her as an almost unrecognizable young Arkansas mother with brown hair, big glasses and loafers, spotting her daughter on a pony ride; on the website Medium, she stares out at you, just another earnest face in a crowd posing for a 1965 high school class picture. In the first television ads of the campaign, she is seemingly from another era, pictured in grainy black and white, about 10 years old with a half-smile on her face, hair pulled back in a pollyanna, holding her mother’s hand.


Since launching her campaign last June, Clinton has flooded the Internet and filled her TV spots with surprising, little-known images of the candidate pulled from old family photo albums, all part of a larger campaign strategy to make Clinton more relatable to voters. The nostalgic pictures are designed to present her as an average person — rather than a global brand — and to neutralize the negative image Clinton can sometimes project as the untrustworthy political insider campaigning in a rich lady's uniform of bold-colored pantsuits and a helmet of blonde hair.

At one time, the images might have been too loaded to be advertised. The Clintons' student activism was still the source of some controversy in the 1990s; their 1960s and 1970s attire and hairstyles might have served as a reminder of cultural and generational battles still fresh in some voters' minds. But those concerns have faded with the passage of time.

Clinton’s campaign tried a similar strategy on a significantly smaller scale in 2008, when her ad man at the time, Jimmy Siegel, shot a 30-second television spot titled “Scranton.” The commercial featured gauzy footage of Clinton as a toddler in 1950, running around the working class city where her grandfather worked at a lace mill. “There was no heat or indoor shower,” Clinton narrates in a voiceover, describing her stays at a cabin there every summer, “Just the joy of family."

The ad ran only in Pennsylvania, a state Clinton won in the 2008 primary. But in general, former aides said, Clinton’s last campaign was resistant to the softer focus, choosing instead to highlight her strength and experience.

This time around, however, the campaign is all in on the nostalgic memes as it tries to humanize a candidate who has stumbled through a difficult summer, with the controversy over her emails reinforcing the most negative stereotypes of the Clintons as paranoid and secretive, playing by their own set of rules. In polls, a majority of voters think Clinton is untrustworthy, and describe her as “dishonest.”

The goal in highlighting the photos, campaign officials said, was to let voters see who Clinton was before 1992, when she entered the national consciousness as first lady, and to reinforce the message that Clinton is one of the world’s “least-known well-known people.”

“The pictures of her early years are important in telling her story, where she came from, the moments that shaped her life,” said Jim Margolis, Clinton’s media adviser and top ad maker. In the television spots, Margolis said, many of the images were chosen because they show a young Clinton at work — fighting for school reform as first lady of Arkansas, or working straight out of law school for the Children’s Defense Fund.

The slideshow of photos in ads, Margolis explained, is to demonstrate that “it’s not just talk, it’s not more promises, but you can count on her to fight for you, because that’s what she’s always done — take a look for yourself, here she is.”

Scores of photographs that disarm are part of the campaign's continuing effort to show a softer side as well.

On Thursday, for instance, while Clinton appeared on “Ellen,” where she reiterated her apology for using a private server while at the State Department and then performed the “whip/nae nae” dance, her campaign was busy online.



View Photo gallery Hillary Clinton's vintage strategy: Big glasses, a tricycle and hipster Bill Since launching her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has flooded the Internet and airwaves with surprising, little-known images of the candidate pulled from old family photo albums. Here’s a look at 15 of them from her Instagram account.



On Instagram, the campaign posted a headshot of a fresh-faced young Clinton as a student at Wellesley College, part of the launch of “Wellesley Women for Hillary.” That followed a post on Medium, for which Clinton published an essay, “Remembering My School Days,” which was as much a vehicle for the grainy black and white shots of Clinton the student, as it was for the words accompanying them.

Overall, the strategy appears to be working in terms of capturing attention: on Instagram, the vintage shots — some of them iconic, some completely new — are always her most popular. Clinton’s second-most “liked” photograph — surpassed only by a selfie with Kim Kardashian — is a picture of a young Hillary and shaggy-haired Bill Clinton, smiling and staring into each other’s eyes. It got almost 26,000 “likes.” On Facebook, where more than 1.3 million people follow her page, Clinton's old photograph of her husband and newborn baby, Chelsea, received more than 58,500 likes.

Even the campaign website’s 404 error page, which appears when a visitor clicks on a broken link, features a picture of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton from the 1980s, grinning with Donald Duck, and sporting Donald Duck hats.

Old photographs work better for Clinton than some of the other top candidates in the race, media strategists said, because of her outsize fame — many people simply enjoy looking at celebrities. There's less of an appetite to gawk at baby pictures of Jeb Bush, for instance, because he’s still developing his national brand — Clinton, on the other hand, is trying to manipulate hers. Photos don't speak so directly to Jeb Bush's problems relating to voters. “Baby pictures are warm and emotional,” said one Democratic strategist. “That’s what Hillary needs to show. Jeb Bush’s problem is different, it’s that he’s boring.”

The numbers bear that out. Since launching her Instagram feed last June, Clinton has posted 15 photographs from the archives. Bush, in contrast, has posted three that show off his childhood, or his life before he served as Florida governor. Donald Trump, who has shared on Instagram a handful of shots of himself as a young businessman posing with famous actors, has posted just two shots from his childhood.

Republican strategists have noticed the onslaught of old Clinton photographs, but doubt that it will help change any opinions of someone who has been in public life for two decades. In fact, some think it only highlights the fact that at 67, Clinton is one of the oldest candidates for president.

“Her problem is that she doesn’t represent the future — she is a tired brand in a market that is exhausted,” said Republican ad maker Brad Todd, currently doing work for Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal’s super PAC. “Her ads and the photos are making her more tired and more dusty.” He said they appear to be aimed at her base — women who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, who project their own lives onto hers. But he said it’s a futile effort to try and normalize Clinton. “She will never be that again,” he said of the Hillary presented in black and white. “The women who has said she hasn’t driven since 1996 can’t be regular or normal.”

Republican media consultant Rick Wilson said the pictures are a smart play for a candidate who's suffering in terms of likability — but the campaign still has an uphill road when it comes to revamping Clinton's image. “They have to go back and build out the greatest hits: the young career woman, the likable mom,” Wilson said. “They’re looking for people to look at a new narrative of Hillary Clinton. But her brand is entrenched, so settled, it’s very difficult to wake up and say it’s a new Hillary Clinton.”

