Trump Clinton

(PennLive file photo)

By Charlie Gerow

One-hundred-seventy days are several lifetimes in politics, especially in presidential-election years.

Republican strategist Charlie Gerow (PennLive file)

That's how many days remain before voters go to the polls in November. Already the race looks very different than it did just a couple of weeks ago.

The twists and turns of the rest of the campaign trail are as difficult to predict as what's already occurred this year.

One thing that's coming into sharper focus is that the best thing Donald Trump has going for him is Hillary Clinton.

Team Clinton chortled over the possibility of a Trump candidacy.

Their internal polls showed her breezing by a candidate they viewed as incurably flawed. They'd hammer him for being anti-women and measure for draperies in the West Wing.

Their giddiness is already proving to be incredibly misplaced. Far from being a walkover, the race is already shaping up as a schoolyard brawl that could go either way but currently favors not Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump.

The respected Quinnipiac Poll recently showed that the Big Triple - Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida - are all within the margin of error.

This week national polls show Trump leading Clinton for the first time (from +1 to +5). It's clearly a brand new game - with 170 days to go.

Hillary Clinton has a penchant for misreading the electorate and, as a result, blowing leads.

In 2008, Team Clinton thought they'd waltz through the primaries and be coronated in the general election. That same "inevitability strategy" was their mindset as 2016 began.

But a 74-year-old socialist who's never attended a Democratic state or national convention has chased her around the track far longer than anyone would have predicted.

Philadelphia, not Cleveland, looks to be the rancorous convention, at least if the first fights on the floor of the Democratic state convention in Nevada are any indication.

Meanwhile, Republicans are coalescing much faster than expected. There are still nearly two months until they arrive in Cleveland. How well Donald Trump can continue to unite his base before then remains vital.

In 2008, when Hillary Clinton's miscalculations helped propel his candidacy, Barack Obama went on to sweep Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida by more than a million votes.

In 2012 he ran the table on the Big Three, although by much smaller margins. While winning Florida by only a point, he bested Mitt Romney in the Keystone State by more than 300,000 votes.

Although he carried 13 counties, most of them were in the vote-rich Philadelphia media market where his margins eclipsed 600,000 votes (compared to less than 30,000 in 1988, the last time a Republican carried Pennsylvania).

Philadelphia has always been the Democratic base. It used to be that the suburban "collar counties" were a firewall to the huge votes the Democrats got out of the city.

No longer.

Today the urban liberals and non-white voters are coupled with increasingly liberal suburbanites like the "soccer moms" of a generation ago. Bucks, Montgomery and Delaware Counties, once bastions of GOP strength, are now all Democratic in voter registration.

Will the math hold up for Hillary and Company in Pennsylvania? Take a look at how Donald Trump did in the recent Pennsylvania primary where he took a record sweep of all 67 counties.

In Philadelphia he took nearly 60 percent of the votes. In Bucks he got 56.6 percent and 52 percent in Delaware. He dipped below 50 percent in Montgomery and Chester Counties, but still won by wide 15-percent-plus margins.

There are issues that work against Hillary Clinton's prospects in the Quaker State.

She's misread the electorate. In one recent poll last week Trump led her in "ability to manage the economy" by a dozen points.

One reason Hillary is losing the pocketbook issues is her public pronouncement that she'll put Bill in charge of the economy. In doing so she essentially says she'll hand off her job to her husband. That doesn't work on several levels.

Even if it were a good idea, many of the voters Hillary needs to reclaim can't remember when Bill was president, much less what he did to or for the economy.

Hillary's reflexive inside-the-beltway reality also caused her to hype up anti-gun rhetoric, believing it appealed to her core constituency.

"I think we have to try everything that works to limit the number of people and the kinds of people who are given access to firearms," she proclaimed in a recent debate.

A quick look at the "kinds of people" who now hold, by their choice, right-to-carry permits shows why she is way off base.

Florida is the number-one issuer of right-to-carry permits with more than 1.4 million. Pennsylvania is second. We have nearly 1.1 million in the commonwealth. Ohio is in the top 10 with half a million.

Bill and Hillary figured that the "gun lobby" was a bunch of hillbillies in rural and southern states. The numbers don't lie.

There are millions of them in the Big Three. They have families and friends, and they vote.

Hillary also missed by misunderstanding the impact of the safe and responsible development of natural gas.

"By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place," she intoned at a Democratic presidential debate.

That line might not matter in production states like Texas, Oklahoma or Alaska which are already solid red.

But what about Pennsylvania and Ohio? She's already blown it with coal-working families.

This only adds fuel to the conflagration around her. Give her line to the more than 150,000 workers in Ohio or more than 100,000 here and see how taking their jobs away works for them.

Hillary's rapid decline in the polls is two-fold: She's a lousy candidate, personally distrusted and unliked by large segments of the electorate; and she's off base on key policy issues to boot.

Team Hillary thought they had Donald Trump all figured out. They prayed they'd get to face him in the fall.

As a result they focused their campaign on issues that people didn't really care about. Trump was laser focused on the things that matter to voters.

It looks like Donald Trump's biggest asset may be Hillary Clinton. The next 170 days will tell.