PHILADELPHIA — On the night of Pennsylvania’s primary in 2008, Bill Clinton asked Gov. Ed Rendell to print out returns and highlight in yellow the results for about 20 counties. The former president had campaigned on his own for his wife in these tiny hamlets, towns where voter registration averaged around 15,000 people.

He took one look at the sheet of paper Rendell had handed him and began shouting.


“Look what Ed and I did!” he yelled across the hotel suite to his wife, waving the results that showed her taking huge margins in the places he had campaigned. “Look what Ed and I did!”

Bill Clinton wants to do it again.

With four months to go until Election Day, the presumptive nominee’s husband is “singularly obsessed” with bringing back to the fold white voters who twice elected him to the Oval Office, according to a source familiar with his thinking.

He is laser-focused on Florida and sees a win in the battleground state as the checkmate move to beat Donald Trump. But Bill Clinton, who has virtually disappeared from the campaign trail since the June 7 primaries, is eager to tour the Rust Belt states and even the red South to cut into Trump’s margins as well.

In interviews with more than a dozen party leaders close to the former president or involved in his wife’s campaign, Bill Clinton's allies discussed his personal connection to the voters who have slowly deserted the Democratic Party — and how that has only increased his personal desire to win them back. “Whoever he thinks he can’t get, he doubles down,” psychoanalyzed one longtime associate. “It’s the Bill Clinton nature. He knows that he connects with those voters. He knows that from his prior elections, from being out the road, and it galls him that they are not swooning for his Hillary.”

His wife's campaign sees the value in letting him take up his personal challenge.

"We can use President Clinton with any audience that is part of our base or the swing universe that we are reaching for,” said Clinton’s senior strategist Joel Benenson. “He obviously has value with white working-class and middle-class voters, especially older ones who remember his presidency fondly."

But Bill Clinton following his gut hasn’t always worked out so well.

Over the objections of 2008 campaign advisers, he insisted on trying to single-handedly deliver African-American voters in South Carolina to his wife’s campaign. He failed. And this year, in 2016, he refused to give up the fight for New Hampshire, neighboring state to Bernie Sanders’ Vermont. Again, he failed.

But against Trump, Bill Clinton is convinced he can be the main agent to bring home the working-class white vote this fall by discrediting the Republican nominee as a blue-collar champion.

“Part of what he needs to do is call BS on Donald Trump,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan. “He can inform people that Trump is blowing hot air into these issues — that his ties are made in China, his suits are made in Mexico, his picture frames are made in Turkey.”

“It’s calling out Trump in a way that acknowledges that he did strike a chord with you, we understand that, but let me tell you why it’s wrong.”

Not all of Clinton’s allies share her husband’s enthusiasm for spending time luring white men back to the party. Indeed, this group of voters — who in the decades since electing Bill Clinton to the White House have steadily drifted toward the GOP — are far from the foundation of the Obama coalition that Hillary Clinton is trying to recreate.

Still, some campaign operatives see Bill Clinton’s interest as the perfect side project for a surrogate who in the past has been a mixed blessing for his wife. His interactions with protesters created unwelcome distractions during the primary, at times ending up with a red-faced Clinton wagging his finger angrily in the face of Black Lives Matter protesters, acting as a one-man rapid response team defending the aftershocks of his 1994 crime bill. And he holds less appeal among millennials too young to remember the economic boom times of his administration.

But for down-on-their-luck workers, even the NAFTA president is emerging as the campaign’s best surrogate for explaining the technological revolution and global economy in ways that workers respond to, even as he views those changes as inevitable and unstoppable. “There’s a Southern saying that the fleas come with the dog — he may have some fleas but he’s one hell of a dog,” said Roy Neel, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. “When you think about where he has arguably made missteps, when you consider her opponent, they would be minor in the extreme.”

Added Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton hand who now advises the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, “He grew up with those folks. He’s never going to write them off. This is emotional as well as intellectual.”

White voters may be a marginal issue for Hillary Clinton, but they loom larger in Bill Clinton’s eyes, in part because they were critical when he was running for president. In 1992, he lost white voters by just 2 percent to President George H. W. Bush, and again by the same margin to Bob Dole four years later.

But those voters have been slowly drifting away from the party for years. Gore lost whites by 13 percent in 2000; John Kerry lost them by 17 percent in 2004; and Obama lost them by 12 percent and then by 20 percent in 2008 and 2012. So far, campaign manager Robby Mook said, the campaign sees Trump getting “at worst a slight increase of support over what [Mitt] Romney got.”

Obama was able to win comfortably against Romney even while losing white voters by a stunning margin because the white share of the vote has decreased by 10 percent — from 87 percent in 1992 to 72 percent in 2012. This year, whites will account for about 70 percent of the electorate.

While Hillary Clinton could mimic Obama’s 2012 map and still lose white voters by a large margin, some Democratic strategists advise deploying Bill Clinton to cut into those margins, in part because Clinton is not expected to inspire Obama-level turnout among African-Americans. “There is one very Republican subgroup of whites where Hillary can and should deploy her husband,” said Begala, pointing to “college-educated whites. No Democrat has ever won college-educated whites.” Romney beat Obama by 14 percent among that cohort, but Clinton is leading Trump in that subgroup by 11 percent. “I would send the Secretary of Explainin’ Stuff right to those college-educated whites. They are deeply resistant to Trump for obvious reasons. And they are very open to hearing from the president who brought peace and prosperity, and who talks to them like grownups, not haranguing them with hate as Trump does.”

Clinton campaign sources said the campaign is considering sending Bill Clinton to the Rust Belt, and to Florida, where he can speak to older voters, beginning in September. The hope is that Bill Clinton doesn’t focus on the old map instead of the new. But there are some signs that he still wants to campaign on his home turf. “They are not giving up or conceding any state across the country — especially the South,” insisted Clinton friend Alison Lundergan Grimes, the secretary of state in Kentucky, who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2014 and is one of the last remaining Democrats elected statewide.

“He talks the language,” Rendell said, recalling a campaign stop in Pittsburgh in 1996 at which Clinton won over gun-toting union voters. “He said, ‘Listen to me clearly: Since the Brady Bill’s been in operation, half a million criminals and crazy people have been denied guns — and not one of you has lost a minute in the deer woods.’ He said ‘deer woods’ like someone who’s a real hunter. The beauty of Bill Clinton is [that] in western Pennsylvania and Kentucky, he’s a hillbilly.”

This year, Rendell said, “Bill Clinton’s not going to persuade us to get 60 percent of the working-class white vote in Ohio. But if we get 40 percent, we’re in business.”

He’s already showing signs that he still gets an endorphin rush out of even the smallest victory. More than 100 angry white voters from southern West Virginia stood outside the school gymnasium in the tiny city of Logan, Donald Trump signs in hand, to greet him at a campaign stop last May.

For a city with a population of about 1,700, it was no small show of anger at what the Clinton brand had come to sell in suffering coal country. Spoiling for an argument, the former president invited the protesters to come inside and hear him out — the ultimate challenge.

“I came here to tell you that I care about what you’re going through,” he told the angry crowd, pacing the room with mic in hand. “I get it.”

“We want work!” a heckler interrupted.

“We are not going to resolve this today,” Clinton responded. “All I can tell you is if she wins, I will do every single solitary thing I can personally. I will do everything I can.”

It was a gamble. But one protester — a heavyset young white man wearing a gray Trump T-shirt and a distressed baseball cap with an American flag logo — approached Clinton on the rope line after his speech: “I have to get a new T-shirt,” he smiled sheepishly.

Clinton beamed, ogling the Trump shirt he had successfully retired: He still got it.

Shane Goldmacher contributed to this report.