Since Hillary Clinton launched her own political career in 1999, Republican operatives have been polling and focus-grouping specific attacks about Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, hunting for story lines to potentially damage her.

They have never worked.


In 2000, during Rudy Giuliani’s brief Senate bid in New York, his pollster, Frank Luntz, tested voter responses to information about the president’s history of extramarital affairs. “It was terrible,” recalled Rick Wilson, the GOP strategist on the campaign who hired Luntz. “It made Hillary Clinton more human, more relatable, more sympathetic — we found that you can’t come at the problem the right way.”

But back then, the Monica Lewinsky affair was still fresh on America’s mind. Would time paint Hillary Clinton’s actions and decisions in a harsher light?

Wilson again polled a question about Bill Clinton’s affairs during the 2008 presidential election, when he was working for a right wing PAC. His pollster put the subject out in the field among independent women in Florida, Missouri and Virginia, among other states. “It did not move the numbers at all,” Wilson recalled.

In 2014, the right wing America Rising PAC hired Republican strategist Christine Matthews, a partner at Burning Glass Consulting, to conduct focus groups testing the Bill Clinton sex scandals, including Hillary Clinton’s role in allegedly “enabling” her husband, or threatening the “other” women. The work was commissioned under the assumption that Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, and the PAC would have a ready-made opposition research file it would hand over to the Republican nominee.

The feedback: Try anything but.

“Anytime you got into the personal aspects of Hillary Clinton, it was very ineffective,” said Matthews. “Women voters are of two minds about the Clinton marriage: On one level, they think she stayed with him for political reasons, which feeds the view that she’s a politically calculating person. The other is, he did a lot of really bad things and she stuck through it and there’s sympathy there.”

But more to the point, Matthews said, female voters viewed attacks on Hillary Clinton’s spouse as “inherently unfair. Ultimately, it came back down to this: Bill Clinton’s not the one who’s running.”

When it came to criticizing Hillary Clinton as an enabler, Matthews said, the reaction was, "yeah, you’re angry. It’s a normal reaction. Any line of messaging on this generates sympathy for her, or voters said it was completely irrelevant.”

The women in the America Rising focus group also identified areas they would consider off-limits in terms of Clinton attacks: “It was her age, her stamina, her health and her looks,” Matthews recalled.

And yet.

With 26 days to go in the race, Donald Trump has said he plans to launch a full-scale attack on the former president. “We’re going to turn Bill [Clinton] into Bill Cosby,” his campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Bloomberg News earlier this week. And in a new television spot, Trump questions his opponent’s health and stamina, using footage of Hillary Clinton coughing and stumbling to get into her van.

The burn-down-the-house plan first materialized at the second debate on Sunday, at which Trump invited women who have accused Bill Clinton of assault or harassment to sit in the front row, and then used the former president as a human shield to defend himself.

“Mine are words, his was action,” Trump said from the debate stage, speaking before new, on-the-record allegations this week that he groped women. “There’s never been anybody in the history politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women.”

Clinton skirted the mud pile. “Let me start by saying that so much of what he’s just said is not right,” she said, “but he gets to run his campaign any way he chooses.”

And so he is. On Thursday night, Sean Hannity plans to feature three of Bill Clinton's accusers: Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. And Trump’s campaign has promised new revelations from previously unknown women.

The entire subject matter is deeply unpleasant to Hillary Clinton — historically, only the inner lining of her inner circle of aides feels comfortable even broaching the subject to her: that includes people like Cheryl Mills, who served as one of Bill Clinton’s attorneys during his impeachment trial.

And Hillary Clinton’s campaign won’t say whether it has focused-grouped or poll-tested the ugly attacks; instead, her operatives point to the work Republicans have done in past elections.

But Democratic allies are thrilled with the politically nonsensical narrative.

“The Trump campaign is not famous for doing any kind of research,” said Clinton ally David Brock, founder of Correct the Record, an outside PAC that coordinates with the campaign. “Everything I’m familiar with in terms of testing on this shows that people don’t blame Hillary Clinton for 20-year-old allegations, most of which were unproven. The public adjudicated this a long time ago.”

Instead, Brock called it “a giant exercise in projection. If there’s a Bill Cosby here, it will turn out to be Donald Trump, not Bill Clinton.”

That hasn’t prevented Clinton world from worrying about the issue. In 2008, several people on Hillary Clinton’s campaign harbored deep concerns that new revelations about her husband's extramarital affairs could come up and derail his wife’s campaign.

And in Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, her operatives found that suburban women in New York disliked Clinton because of her decision to stay with her husband. But that year, the campaign chose not to address the issue head-on, focusing instead on working-class women upstate, who viewed Hillary Clinton as a champion. The campaign waited for suburban women to come on board. The campaign also had Clinton participate in small, intimate coffee sessions with the skeptical suburban female voters so they could begin viewing her in a different light.

Democrats close to Clinton speculated that the individuals guiding Trump’s strategy, like Bannon, are most likely focused on what will happen after Nov. 8 — and empowering the Trump base to become a movement of anti-Clinton opposition, whether it’s through a media operation or a grass-roots movement.

“If your strategy is not to win, and only appeal to the base to get them more rabid, OK,” said Matthews. “If your strategy is trying to win the election or message to women, this would not be the strategy.”

But at the same time, the Trump campaign appeared to still be trying to win over the suburban female voters appalled by Trump’s bragging about trying to kiss and grope women without consent. On Thursday, his daughter Ivanka participated in three events, billed as “coffee with Ivanka” in key Philadelphia suburbs.

But possibly the biggest problem with the attacks, some Clinton allies said, was the source: a man who has bragged about groping women, and who is now fielding multiple accusations of harasment and assault.

“I don’t think any attempt to reopen it is really going to be successful,” said Mark Penn, Clinton's senior strategist on her 2008 campaign. “And I think they don’t cure Trump’s problem, which is, what was his attitude and activities with women?”

A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment about the campaign’s strategy.

But Republicans said they were certain the Fox appearances on Thursday would only drive more women into Clinton’s arms. “The attacks made women who otherwise didn’t like Hillary defensive of her,” said anti-Trump activist Tim Miller, who worked at the America Rising PAC during the time of its focus groups. “They were the worst attacks we tested in almost every group.”