Even as Hillary Clinton continues to absorb fire from a primary challenger on her left, she has begun executing a methodical general election strategy aimed chiefly at winning over voters in the center.

Her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has laid out a road map for controlling crucial battleground states that focuses on the anxieties of independents and moderate Republican voters, particularly women, who are alarmed by what they have heard from likely Republican nominee Donald Trump.

The Clinton campaign sees in those moderates a rich opportunity to build on the coalition of voters who twice propelled Barack Obama into the Oval Office. Polls suggest moderate voters, at least for now, lean against the presumed GOP standard-bearer in numbers that outpace those from recent presidential races.

The target voters are found in large numbers in suburban parts of key swing states, areas such as the outskirts of Denver, the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor. Clinton is aggressively courting them with an approach designed to reduce her risk by limiting direct engagement with her unpredictable Republican rival while calling attention to his shoot-from-the-hip pronouncements and nationalistic appeals, which unnerve many voters.


June Primary Election Preview

It’s an approach Trump might wave away as “low energy” — and it is that way by design. Faced with an opponent who relishes confrontation and drama, but whom many voters see as unsteady, the Clinton campaign sees an opportunity in playing up the former secretary of state’s detailed knowledge of policy, even at the risk of sometimes appearing dull.

That approach can serve both as a defense against Trump’s inevitable attacks and as a way to undermine his appeal, the Clinton camp hopes. The goal is to tap into skepticism among voters that Trump has the experience and temperament to deliver on his promises of a better economy and a more secure world.

The Democrats have already begun to stoke those concerns with advertisements highlighting some of Trump’s most controversial statements. The assault will intensify next month, as the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA kicks off a $130 million advertising campaign in seven key swing states.

“We are going to make a very clear case,” said Justin Barasky, a spokesman for Priorities USA. “Donald Trump is simply too risky and too dangerous a person to be president of the United States.... Do you want someone who is likely to fly off the handle and make rash decisions protecting the country?”


National security consistently ranks as a top concern of undecided voters. While many of those voters have misgivings about Clinton’s handling of the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, or the FBI investigation into her email practices while heading the State Department, they may worry more about arming Trump with nuclear-weapon launch codes.

As the super PAC unloads on Trump, Clinton will be presenting herself as the calm, steady hand with deep experience navigating international crises. She will do so by continuing to respond to major world events with detailed foreign policy addresses that showcase her diplomacy and national security chops, as she did after the terrorist attacks late last year in Paris and San Bernardino.

Priorities USA will also work to undermine Trump’s populist economic pitch, making the case that his promises of restoring coal mining and manufacturing jobs are empty and that his business background is dubious.

To heighten the contrast, Clinton has been laying out in detail how she would go about easing the economic, health care and national security anxieties that consume the moderate middle.


In chats at voter roundtables, rallies at union halls and speeches at policy centers, Clinton dives so deep into the weeds that at times she seems to be running for the job of technocrat in chief. The eagerness with which she entices voters to her exhaustive buffet of often incremental policy proposals calls to mind the campaigns of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, whose wonkiness was a key selling point to voters when he was first elected in 1992.

Now the approach is aimed at winning over moderates troubled by all the political baggage the Clintons have accumulated in the years since Bill Clinton first ran.

Clinton has considerable work ahead of her.

In many of the states where she has lost primaries, independents sided with her Democratic rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.


In some swing states, Clinton found herself unable to escape the perception among independent voters that she supported international trade deals that pushed jobs overseas and that she has been too cozy with Wall Street.

The optics for Clinton were not good this month in West Virginia. Coal miners angry with a remark she made recently that seemed cavalier about the decline of their industry came out in force to heckle her. Clinton’s comment to CNN in March that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” will haunt her at least through November.

Clinton’s campaign had written West Virginia off as unwinnable well before the May 10 election. But a spokesman said she went there as a symbol of going to places where people have not supported her in the past and may not in the future to show that she “is trying to reach out and be that unifying figure that is the antithesis of what Trump represents.”

Halper writes for the California News Group, publisher of the Union-Tribune and Los Angeles Times.