Hillary Clinton’s path to victory

Hillary Clinton and her allies are hoping to cut into Donald Trump’s numbers among white voters by appealing to those with college degrees, women in particular. | AP Photo



If the blue wall holds, she needs only one swing state to win the White House.

By Shane Goldmacher and Annie Karni

06/19/16 07:34 AM EDT

Updated 06/19/16 09:56 AM EDT

Hillary Clinton’s super PAC has begun spending $145 million on ads in eight states through November — and there’s a realistic path for her to win the White House even if she carries only one of them.

It’s a sign of how strongly tilted the Electoral College map is in Clinton’s favor, as she begins a general election campaign building upon the demographic and geographic coalition that President Obama rode to two electoral landslides. Donald Trump, in contrast, must dramatically reimagine and redraw the political landscape to capture the presidency.

Rather than expand the 2012 map in any significant way, the Clinton campaign and its allies want to replicate it. They are obsessed with choking off Trump’s narrower path, hoping to strike a decisive victory in Florida — multiple Clinton officials declared there is nearly no path for Trump without it — while aggressively defending the Democratic-leaning states in the industrial Midwest that Trump has talked most about flipping — most importantly, Pennsylvania. Campaign officials say they think Clinton can turn out more female voters than Obama did. But they see one surrogate in particular as key to recreating the Obama coalition: President Barack Obama himself.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-clinton-path-victory-224228#ixzz4C377MLZn
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