Pat Caddell: Hillary Clinton ‘Is Trying to Brand Everyone as an Extremist’

On Tuesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked veteran pollster and political analyst Pat Caddell about the CNN poll that shows a ten-point swing toward Donald Trump, putting him two points ahead of Hillary Clinton nationwide.

Caddell anticipated “panic” at what Marlow dubbed “Clinton News Network headquarters.”

He noted that polling averages, such as the one maintained by RealClearPolitics, showed Clinton’s lead slipping from an 8-point high to about 2.4, a movement he attributed to fading negative influence from Trump’s “disastrous August post-convention period.”

“All the polls since late last week have shown her lead at two points or less, or Trump ahead, or tied, except for the NBC Monkey poll, which it’s four points in the four-way race,” Caddell observed, coining an amusing nickname for the poll conducted by NBC News and Survey Monkey.

He pointed to another important sign from overseas, a “dog whistle about the popular uprising that’s going on in the world,” namely the “drubbing” suffered by Angela Merkel’s party in Germany’s state elections.

Caddell took these elections, in combination with the Brexit vote, as evidence of “what [he has] said for two years or more: the people are not happy, the peasants are rising up.”

“But let me also caution people, this closing of the race – this is the closing of the national. The states are still coming in. They tend to trail what happens nationally – but this election is not decided,” he added. “I’ve been looking at the polls, and Trump’s not regained his big advantage that he had, pre-convention, yet on economy, on foreign policy, or on terrorism.”

He thought Trump’s trip to Mexico was a plus, and “certainly, in the last couple of weeks, he has been more disciplined, if you leave aside his tweeting in the middle of the night,” but he has not yet erased his problem with “demeanor.”

“Hillary Clinton has been slipping. I think that’s the story,” he said. However, Caddell pronounced himself “skeptical” of the ten-point swing suggested by the CNN poll, while allowing that it would be “amazing” if true.

“I think we’re right now in a very tight race, and it’s still – one of the two candidates control the electoral narrative, a lot of which will be determined at the debates,” he predicted. “If Trump can make this election about a referendum on what is happening, and whether people want to keep it, I think it’s in his ballpark. I think he’s got the initiative.”

“Hillary Clinton is spending millions and millions of dollars, trying to hold on to these states, attacking Trump, trying to keep this candidate-to-candidate, making the argument that Trump is too risky.” Caddell added, “This is the least efficient return on expenditures I have ever seen because it has not stopped his movement,” then continued, “If that’s what they’re doing to try to hold on to the lead, it’s going to take a lot more money because it’s not working very well.”

Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam joined the conversation to note that international summits would be “awkward” if a President Hillary Clinton found herself surrounded by European leaders drawn from the populist-nationalist tradition she has “made it her business to abuse and malign” throughout her campaign.

Caddell said he never thought Clinton’s strategy of assaulting populist leaders or websites such as Breitbart News, was “not necessarily smart.”

“What she is doing is trying to brand everyone as an extremist, versus her political class, what she would consider mainstream,” he said. “But voters consider it the political class that has screwed them.”

Caddell said this merely emphasizes that Clinton “doesn’t understand the country, and that she represents a political class – by the way, Democrats and Republicans alike in DC, the Bush legacy as well as the Clinton legacy people – who are all in bed together at maintaining an order in this country in which they benefit, in which the rules are different for them, as we have seen on the emails and others, and everybody else takes the hindpost.”

He included the mainstream media in that corrupt order, criticizing them for “no longer defending the people’s right to know, and investigating power, but serving as the outriders of the political class and attempting to suppress whatever news would be harmful, to the extent they can.”

Caddell said this bias can be seen in “how paltry the coverage of the email – or, if you want a better example, Hillary going back and having a gaggle with the reporters on the plane, which one of the papers described as a series of softballs tossed at her, and compare that with how they are attacking” Donald Trump.

“The problem is, if Trump understands how to control the message, which he has not shown me that he really understands yet, how to control it, all of that can work to his advantage,” said Caddell, “because he can put it into context for people, in which they are not stupid. They can see what’s happening.”

He cited recent Gallup polling that showed that “the press has hit its lowest level of confidence from the American people in history,” a finding consistent with what Caddell’s work with Gravis Marketing and Breitbart News has found.

“Both newsprint and television media are the same, at 21 percent confidence, almost at the bottom of the rating,” Caddell noted, comparing it to Gravis/Breitbart News findings that more than two-thirds of respondents no longer viewed CNN or The New York Times as “fair and objective” news sources.

“These numbers suggest to me that this is not about an attack on the media as individuals or just whining, which is always the danger in the past,” he said. “It is to elevate, as I was trying to say a few moments ago, the argument to an institutional critique of how they are abandoning their role, under the First Amendment, to protect the people, and instead are attempting to protect power.”

Another example of bias Caddell cited was the media’s effort to minimize Donald Trump’s visit to Mexico. “They need to be called out – not, as I said, in a complaining, whining part, but in illustrating how they have lined up against the interests of the American people. That will discredit them, and it will help further the argument.”

“I believe that we are in what I call a new paradigm election. Some people say it’s a black swan. I have said for two years it is nothing like your father or your grandfather’s elections. We’re into something entirely different. History is being shaped,” he declared.

A “black swan” election would be a contest shaped by a major negative event. Caddell, instead, described 2016 as a contest between “two candidates who are broadly seen unfavorably, with different problems.”

He castigated the mainstream media for deliberately refusing to appreciate how serious Hillary Clinton’s scandal problems are, noting that Gravis/Breitbart polling found two-thirds of the public thinks she should have been indicted for her handling of classified material on her secret email server.

“A large, huge majority of people, they’ve already made a judgment that the Clinton Foundation was pay-for-play,” Caddell added, despite media efforts to diminish the evidence against her.

“This corruption is not just her being corrupt,” he asserted, adding:

It is an effort to instill in this country, and instill in the White House, a criminal operation that benefits the people who give her money. … This is a fundamental threat to democracy. Our democracy has survived incompetence, mistakes, what have you, but what it cannot survive is the cancer eating at it, of a corrupt system in which truth does not exist, and no one is held accountable.

Caddell also addressed the “sense that maybe there’s problems” with Hillary Clinton’s health, citing a Rasmussen poll that showed a large majority in favor of both candidates releasing their full medical records, and even President Obama’s doctor saying, “Given her attacks, she needs a more thorough medical examination.”

“I’m going, wait a minute, this is serious, and yet it’s all being pooh-poohed by the media,” Caddell said. “They would defend her if she had a tantrum and ran down the street, ripping off her clothes; they would be saying how transparent she was.”

“The comeback is, Trump should release his tax returns, which people think he should. I think it’s way past time to do that,” he suggested. “But I think health is going to be a subtle concern for people. How big? We will see in the next thirty to forty days, actually. It’s growing.”

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

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