Monday on CNN’s “The Axe Files” podcast, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton super PAC strategist Paul Begala said they are running television advertising unopposed in battleground states with the purpose of building a “ceiling” that the support for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump cannot go above.
Begala explained they are trying to “define the Republican early,” so he said, “With Trump, he wants to build a wall; I want to build a ceiling. Right now he’s got his 40 — no not even 40 — 30, 35 percent of the vote and it is ironclad. And he is right when he says ‘I can go on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any of my voters,’ But that got him to 13 million votes. As you know, you need 65 to 70 million to win. The path between 13 and 70 is full of people who are not in his base—unmarried woman, college educated woman especially, young people, people of color. I want to build a ceiling. And if you look, we’ve been advertising very heavily on the outrageous things that Donald Trump has said about women, about national security, most powerfully about the disabled and that is building a ceiling. There is only one national poll out of ten or twelve that has him even over 40 and he has got to get close to 50.”
He added, “If you think as a strategist, his path forward has got to be to do better with people with college degrees, women with college degrees, unmarried women and young people. He has pretty much killed himself with people of color. His path has got to be to maximize the white vote among people with a college degree. Those kinds of comments—I think that builds a ceiling for Trump.”
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