Wild election year heads into the home stretch

WASHINGTON — Over the next 65 days, American voters will have to choose between two of the most unloved presidential contenders in history, capping a wildly unpredictable election that has focused largely on immigration and could remake the nation’s political map for another generation.

Exhibit A is Texas, where election officials report growth in voter registration — much of it young people and Latinos — almost all of it attributed to interest in the election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Already, one poll shows Trump with the slimmest Republican lead in recent Lone Star State history, with the potential fallout being a Democratic pickup of the U.S. House District 23 seat, now held by Rep. Will Hurd.

Going into the Labor Day homestretch, when the campaigns traditionally kick into full swing, Clinton holds a five-point average lead over Trump nationally, down from double digits in early August.

After a summer of discontent, Clinton has been hampered by revelations about her personal emails and donations to her family foundation during her time as secretary of state; Trump has been weighed down by staff shakeups and shoot-from-the-hip pronouncements offending African-Americans and other minorities.

Amid the campaign hurly-burly, both candidates have signaled a turn to a more cautious — though not less hard-hitting — general election strategy.

Trump, while stepping up his fiery rhetoric on deportation, also has developed a new appreciation for the campaign Teleprompter, and vowed to stay on message.

“Now we’re getting to Labor Day,” he told the New York Times. “Things will be different.”

Amid the focus on Trump’s campaign escapades and Clinton’s perceived character flaws, voters could lose sight of the unusual nature of this election.

“This really is a unique election and a historical one, certainly in modern times,” said James Thurber, who directs the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.

Thurber noted that Trump has broken a host of hallowed campaign traditions, among them the basic expectations of presenting a core philosophy, building a campaign organization and following a clear strategy.

And unlike typical campaigns for the White House, Trump has spurned the traditional campaign tactics of careful language and methodical, state-by-state voter mobilization.

Instead, he continues to rely on an estimated $2 billion of free media generated by his outsized persona, freewheeling rallies and controversial remarks.

“He has alienated his own party and created a huge split, which is the main story of this campaign,” said Thurber, who sees long odds against Trump. “The question is, how do Republicans keep the party together after he loses?”

Clinton, too, faces a skeptical electorate concerned with her honesty and trustworthiness.

“Trump is the best thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton,” Thurber added, “because she’s got so many negative things associated with her in polls in terms of how she’s behaved.”

Even close in Texas

A poll earlier this summer showed Trump with only a single-digit lead in Texas. That, along with his visit to the Lone Star State in late August — rare for a presidential candidate this late in the campaign — suggest to some that Texas could be in play in November.

That’s unlikely given the recent voting history in Texas, which has not supported a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976. In 2012, Texas voted 57-41 for GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

Not since voters gave fellow Texan Ross Perot significant support in the 1990s for his independent candidacies has the contest between the Republican and Democratic candidates even been relatively close.

Nonetheless, Rice political science Professor Mark Jones predicts a much closer election in Texas than in recent times — a single-digit Trump victory — unless the New York real estate magnate can turn the tide.

The first of three scheduled presidential debates Sept. 26, at Hofstra University in New York, offers Trump an opportunity.

Candidate debates typically are predictable affairs, but Jones observed that these could offer surprises given Trump’s unorthodox ways.

“It’s like playing a football team that doesn’t play by normal rules,” he said. “There’s always a potential that the debate could swing things more in Trump’s favor, but the most likely outcome is that they don’t move the needle.”

Political operatives on both sides liken the state of the race on Labor Day to halftime in a football game. Even after a string of missteps by the Trump camp — including the departure of campaign chairman Paul Manafort amid revelations over his ties to pro-Russian factions in Ukraine — Team Clinton appears to be up by only a field goal.

While the race tightens, political parties and outside groups show no signs of investing in Texas in this election, with one exception — the sizzling rematch between Hurd, R-San Antonio, and Pete Gallego, the Alpine Democrat Hurd unseated in 2014 by a mere 2,400 votes.

The money pouring into the race is emblematic of the push by traditional GOP donors turned off by Trump to concentrate instead on retaining control of Congress.

The Hurd-Gallego matchup, rated as one of fewer than 20 “toss-up” races in the country and likely the only closely contested U.S. House race in Texas, seems certain to surpass the $5.3 million in outside spending two years ago.

Analysts say surging Latino voter registration attributed to Trump’s caustic remarks over the past year could present a difficult challenge for Hurd in Texas-23, a majority Latino district that stretches from San Antonio to east of El Paso.

Hurd, a former CIA employee who has enjoyed a 2-1 fundraising advantage over Gallego, has neither endorsed nor denounced Trump.

Meanwhile, Texas election officials report growth in voter registration across the state.

By late August, Harris County’s registration approached 2.18 million, nearly 158,000 more than the last presidential election in 2012.

Bexar County reported earlier this summer that it had passed the 1 million mark and has registered another 16,000 since, a nearly 100,000 increase in four years.

No matter the election outcome in November, the trend seems to favor Democrats.

“For young Latinos coming of age in their teens and early 20s, seeing Republican politicians using anti-Latino rhetoric can only hurt the Republican Party in the medium to long term,” Jones said. “Whether or not this year is a watershed year, what this year is likely to do is accelerate the existing demographic trends that are playing out negatively for the Republican Party.”

The Latino factor

Trump had made efforts recently to “soften” his approach toward Latino voters amid polls showing that more than 80 percent view him unfavorably. That was followed up, however, by Wednesday night’s rally in Arizona, where he doubled-down on his hard-line immigration views.

The speech prompted an exodus of Hispanic conservatives who had stuck with him to that point, including Houston immigration lawyer Jacob Monty, one of six Texans who had served on the RNC’s Hispanic Advisory Council for Trump.

Other Hispanic Republicans also were left to struggle with their choices.

“The message we’re getting here is one candidate insults us, wants to deport undocumented immigrants, the other wants to use us politically,” said former George W. Bush administration official Alfonso Aguilar, president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

Aguilar and other analysts doubt Trump can turn around perceptions built over the 14 months since he declared his candidacy by decrying Mexican immigrants as rapists, criminals and drug traffickers.

Trump later cemented views among many Latinos by asserting that San Diego federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who’s presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University, was biased against him because of his Mexican heritage.

Experts have likened the potential damage to the GOP’s relationship with the expanding Latino electorate with the aftermath of former California Gov. Pete Wilson’s hard-edged tactics two decades ago.

After Wilson’s infamous “They Keep Coming” ad in 1994 and his campaign to deny state services to undocumented immigrants, the state that had been reliably Republican and produced two GOP presidents in 12 years’ time gradually turned blue and now is considered out of reach for Republican White House candidates.

“The logic Trump is using depends on his credibility, and that’s where his campaign has tremendous difficulty,” said Luis Fraga, co-director of the Institute of Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “I have to think that his statement about Judge Curiel alone was enough to destroy any credibility he might have to speak to Latinos and issues of the Latino community.”

High level of discontent

Some election analysts say Trump’s goal down the backstretch is not to win over Hispanics. Rather it’s to reassure Anglo moderates and independents in the face of an aggressive Clinton campaign attacking the Republican nominee as a Klan-allied racist.

“I don’t know that at the end of the day, Trump’s new strategy is designed for moderate Latinos. What is more likely is that it is designed for moderate Republicans, which would be an easier get for him,” said Simon Rosenberg, founder of the center-left New Democratic Network think tank in Washington.

Clinton, meanwhile, has faced a continuing drip of revelations over her private email server, calling into question her public accounts about turning over all her work-related emails to the State Department.

She also has faced damaging stories suggesting access to her as secretary of state was driven at least in part by donations for the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

On Monday, the Republican National Committee demanded the foundation release all records of correspondence its officials had with the State Department during Clinton’s tenure there.

Even some of Clinton’s Democratic allies have called for her to cut her ties to the organization to remove it as an issue in the campaign.

The net result: polls showing Clinton’s unpopularity reaching new highs, including the latest ABC/Washington Post poll putting her unfavorability ratings at 59 percent, on a par with Trump at 60 percent.

That finding buttressed a Monmouth University survey last week showing a record 35 percent of voters don’t have a favorable opinion of either nominee. Monmouth pollsters said that number never has gone above 9 percent.

“The number of voters who cannot bring themselves to voice a positive opinion of either presidential nominee is more than three times higher than in any other election in recent memory,” said Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray. “This is unprecedented.”

bill.lambrecht@hearstdc.com

kevin.diaz@chron.com