Democrats are starting to fight about what they want Hillary Clinton’s win to look like: Play it safe and focus on beating Donald Trump in the states that will decide the election, or try to run up the score and clobber him?

For strategists preparing for the final phase of the campaign, this is a question of how to allocate money, staff, attention and operations. But it’s really a question of confidence and appetite for risk. Democrats looking at good polls now are torn between being nervous they’ll regret going big and nervous that they’ll regret not going big.


The conversations are happening constantly — including last week during a meeting at Democratic National Committee headquarters convened by interim chair Donna Brazile to talk down-ballot help with top advisers to Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders side urged the Clinton side to capitalize on the moment and help candidates in an expanded map, but Clinton adviser Charlie Baker reminded them of what the former secretary of state’s campaign manager Robby Mook has held to: The goal is to have enough states to win. That, goes the thinking, is complicated enough.

"Robby has got us all focused on 270,” Baker told them, according to people familiar with what was discussed. But, Baker added, they’re very close to thinking about a change.

Theory number one: Clinton can’t leave anything to chance, especially because it’s Trump who’d be the president if she flops, and there are no bonus points in the history books for having toyed around in Utah or even Arizona if he’s the one taking the oath of office on Jan. 20. Good as the past month of polls look for her, the fundamentals haven’t changed: The campaign has to pull off a win for the first major-party female nominee, who’d be the third term in a row for her party, in a weird and raucous political environment — and that candidate is a woman many voters hate.

Theory number two: The bigger Clinton’s win, the larger a mandate she’d be able to claim and the easier it’d be to shoot down the rigged-election conspiracy theories that Trump’s already telegraphed he’ll deploy if he loses. More than any of that: She could help Democrats retake the Senate and shrink Republicans’ majority in the House, despite the flawed candidates they’ve got in a lot of prime pick-up races.

“I come from the school of keep your eye on the 270,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). “The conservative approach is the proper approach: Make sure you have enough to win the Electoral College; don’t take your eye off those states. If you’re so strong in one state, then move to another — that’s all fine. But I think you have to be very wary and very careful.”

Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) does not agree.

“I would hope that she’s got a clear political mandate to get things done the next four years.

"The higher that number, the more the internal self-assessment will take place within the Republican ranks,” Kind said. “If it does turn into a close race, there will be many Republicans who will say, ‘We don’t need a major adjustment.’”

It’s more than that, said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. He thinks Trump “needs to be eviscerated.”

“No one should look at Donald Trump as a real model for the future of politics. I think that needs to be done for the country,” Reed said. “We can do that by humiliating him. We need to send him out with a humiliating defeat, including losing states that other Republicans have not lost.”

Reed’s already eager to see national Democrats make more inroads in Georgia long term, and he argued for the strategic offense-as-defense approach in a state that hasn’t gone blue in a presidential election since 1992 — but where demographics and voting trends are edging in their favor.

“He has proven himself so far to be a poor manager of campaign time,” Reed said. “If Donald Trump gets on a plane to Georgia, if we can force him to come to Georgia, I think that’s going to have negative repercussions for him.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he’s all about running up the score — but that doesn’t mean expanding the map. In his mind, there are more than enough margins to expand in critical states, with more than enough overlapping Senate and House districts to bring along before Democrats start reaching for new ones.

Sen. Chris Murphy: “I’m much more interested in winning the Senate and taking a run at the House than I am in an Electoral College landslide.”

“I’d much rather have her win by 10 points in Pennsylvania than win by 1 point in Utah,” Murphy said. “I’m much more interested in winning the Senate and taking a run at the House than I am in an Electoral College landslide.”

In addition to Pennsylvania, Democrats have prioritized Senate races that overlap with presidential battlegrounds in Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Ohio and Florida, but the party’s also hoping for pick-ups in North Carolina, Arizona and Missouri, among others. Winning the House is much more of a stretch, and would require the party to win in more parts of the country than it can likely get to if Clinton keeps to a narrow map.

Murphy said his experience watching Republicans in 2008 move very quickly against Barack Obama, who’d just been elected president with 365 electoral votes, makes him suspicious of people who think a margin makes for a mandate.

“Personally, I’d love for her to beat the living hell out of Trump, but I think it’s way premature to be thinking about winning by anything more than one electoral vote,” Murphy said.

A Clinton aide pointed to the staff that the campaign has put on the ground in all 50 states, emphasizing the efforts being made to lean into down-ballot help through coordinated campaigns in overlapping battleground states, with an official goal of 270.

“Our campaign is focused on winning state-by-state to earn 270 electoral votes and elect the first woman president in history,” Mook told POLITICO. “We know this race will tighten, and the Trump team's desperation will lead them to embrace more and more conspiracy theories and discredited attacks.”

The map they’re using, though, is aimed at winning every state Obama did in 2012, plus North Carolina and the 2nd Congressional District in Nebraska, which he won in 2008. If that happens, Clinton would be at 348. (That would essentially put them at 350, a number that Obama political guru and Clinton adviser David Plouffe predicted publicly for the former secretary of state in June, to some consternation in Brooklyn.)

But the campaign is projecting mixed messages. Two weeks ago, it was frantically pushing donors on the idea that Trump could win and it needed all the help it could get. Last week, a fundraising email under Clinton's name insisted, “It's not enough just to beat Donald Trump. I want this election to be a definitive statement: that America rejects not just Donald Trump, but the divisive politics of anger and fear that he peddles.”

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, the Democratic Governors Association chairman, said if Trump wants to come back and campaign in his state again like he did the weekend before last, the invitation’s open — “I want Donald to spend a lot of time here, and a lot of money,” he said — but he’s not feeling good enough to start getting too excited.

“I’d rather be in our position than their position, but if you’re in our position and you take your foot off the gas, you end up in their position,” Malloy said.

Malloy said that with Election Day relatively late this year — Nov. 8 stretches the campaign out a few extra days — he’d urge Mook and others to at least wait to make major decisions until the morning of Sept. 27, to assess where the race stands after the first debate.

The campaign’s moves into new states are mostly psychological warfare for now, meant to put a rattled and short-staffed Trump campaign on edge — though that’s enough to get Democrats hopeful about marginal races.

“The more work that Secretary Clinton and Sen. Kaine will do by truly launching a campaign in all 50 states and deploying staff, there will be a positive impact,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.). “As we all know in presidential elections, it truly is the top of the ticket that defines these races.”

After Trump’s performance in the race so far, though, even the cautious are nursing dreams of a Clinton runaway.

“He’s down to five toes total on two feet,” Malloy said of Trump. “How many more does he shoot off? At the rate he’s going …”