Hillary Clinton is getting trounced by Donald Trump when it comes to sheer volume of media coverage, and that's just fine with her.
The presumptive Democratic nominee and her advisers are betting that when it comes to Trump, there is such a thing as bad publicity. Their theory is that the wall-to-wall attention Trump has received, often when creating controversy, has driven his unfavorable ratings to an all-time high for a major-party presidential candidate; 66 percent in a Bloomberg Politics poll last week and 70 percent in a recent Washington Post/ABC News survey.
"We know Trump's willingness to say outrageously offensive things — or lately, the turmoil in his campaign — has the potential to overtake the news cycle," Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in an e-mail. "His ability to dominate a news cycle does not necessarily correspond with winning that news cycle. In fact, it usually means the opposite."
Formulating a campaign strategy around that assumption is part calculation, part necessity. Clinton is by nature a more scripted and cautious politician, and she lacks Trump's talent — honed as a reality TV star — for capturing attention by being flashy or confrontational. A famously secretive person, Clinton, by her own admission, lacks the political talent of her husband, former President Bill Clinton. She also has built up a deep distrust of the press over 2½ decades in the public eye.
While Trump's unconventional campaign revolves around free media and large rallies, Clinton so far has taken a more traditional approach that includes paid advertising, set-piece speeches and ground organization in battleground states.
"Earned media is superior to paid media because it's much more authentic. The way you get free media is by being interesting. You don't get it by saying boring stuff. Trump says a lot of stuff that's not boring. Very provocative. Not really factually based, but always interesting," said John Feehery, a GOP strategist and lobbyist. "Hillary's a little bit different. She's not that interesting. She's really boring."
Jim Manley, a former communications strategist for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, is among Democrats who say Clinton should be doing more interviews and news conferences; outside of occasional and brief interchanges with reporters, her last was on Dec. 4, 2015. But he said trying to match Trump's attention-grabbing tactics is "a losing proposition."
"You can spend the entire campaign chasing Donald Trump around, which is exactly the scenario Trump wants her to be in," said Steve Schale, who managed Obama's 2008 campaign in Florida. Instead, Clinton can "surgically define him through paid media" and opportunities for news coverage to reinforce her message, argued Schale, as she did earlier this week with back-to-back speeches on economic policy and last week in a national security address that excoriated Trump as dangerous and unfit for the presidency.
