Amid early campaign drama, establishment candidates take the long view

All summer, voters have responded to the political establishment with a loud Bronx cheer, turning against anointed presidential candidates in both parties and upending the carefully laid plans of front-runners.

Now, with Labor Day marking the start of an autumn of intense politicking, it’s tempting to look at Democrats and Republicans and see two parties caught in the same fix, both struggling with an electorate that demands outsiders.

But the challenges they face are very different, indeed, almost mirror images of each other.

Democrats enter the fall with a leading candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is broadly acceptable to most factions of the party and whose positions on major issues most Democrats support. But she is dogged by her inability to get past the investigations that trail her and a failure to stir passion among supporters, many of whom find her more admirable than inspiring.

Republicans, by contrast, have a front-runner in Donald Trump who inspires passion to spare. His followers appear ready to forgive him for almost anything. But he is unacceptable to much of the GOP leadership, and his positions on some issues contradict beliefs that have defined the Republican Party for a generation.

Democrats worry their front-runner won’t be able to bring about the heavy turnout they will need to win. Republicans worry theirs will split the party wide open or, come spring, abandon his nonbinding pledge to back the eventual nominee and run a third-party campaign.

Over the course of the fall, a series of events will test whether either party can begin surmounting those hurdles.

The first test comes next week at a televised Republican debate from the Reagan Library in Simi Valley — a chance to see whether any of the candidates have figured out a way to stop Trump, or even significantly slow him down.

As recently as last month, many Republican strategists thought Trump would eventually implode, done in by remarks such as his questioning of whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was a war hero or his suggestion that Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly had sharply quizzed him at the GOP debate in August because she had “blood coming out of her wherever.”

Instead, he has continued to rise in polls and now ranks as the first choice of nearly 1 in 3 GOP voters.

Whether by plan or intuition, Trump has hit on issues — opposition to both legal and illegal immigration, defense of Social Security, criticism of foreign trade and a bellicose foreign policy — that attract a large group of GOP voters who feel ignored, let down or abandoned by the party’s leaders. Although he has significant appeal across Republican voter groups, Trump’s strongest support comes from conservative white, working-class men, polls show.

But many of those positions, including Trump’s openness to tax increases on some companies and wealthy individuals, his opposition to Social Security cuts and his seeming indifference to deficit spending and shrinking the size of government, horrify big parts of the GOP establishment.

The Club for Growth, the Washington-based group that has led the fight to enforce a small-government, anti-tax orthodoxy in the party, has denounced Trump for economic policies “closer to Hillary than Reagan” and has talked of running television ads against him. But so far, the group has not acted.

Some GOP strategists still believe voters will tire of the Trump show, which history suggests is the most likely outcome.

“Trump allows America to kick the establishment in the butt. It feels great. Eventually they’ll get serious about choosing the next president,” said GOP consultant Rob Stutzman.

Others no longer believe Trump will beat himself, but they have been unable to figure out how to take him on.

Those candidates who have attacked Trump have lost ground. That’s been most notable with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Both called Trump a phony conservative, and both have faded out of contention. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon, are among the few candidates who have gained ground recently, and each has avoided criticizing other candidates.

“The biggest mistake you can make right now is to panic and get off message,” said Nick Iarossi, a lobbyist and fundraiser for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who also has largely avoided talking about Trump.

By contrast, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and onetime Republican front-runner, has more directly taken on Trump in recent days, responding to repeated ridicule from his rival. And some think Bush may go after Trump more directly at next week’s debate.

Publicly, though, Bush’s aides say they are taking the long view, believing that their candidate’s huge financial resources and long experience eventually will prevail. If anything, some of them suggest, Trump may be helping them by squelching the ability of any other candidates to get attention.

“To be successful, you need to plan for the long haul,” said Bush’s spokesman Tim Miller. “There are still a lot of voters out there who think they know Jeb. They don’t know his record.”

Clinton’s aides make similar arguments for the long view, with a stronger case. Bush currently ranks as the first choice of only about 8% of GOP voters. Clinton, although her lead has shrunk during the summer, leads the Democratic field nationwide with support from about half of her party’s voters, some 25 points ahead of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The challenge that Sanders represents is far more familiar than the Trump phenomenon. Over the last half a century, Democratic primaries have usually featured an insurgent candidate on the left. Except for Sen. George McGovern in 1972, though, they have never won. (President Obama’s victory over Clinton in 2008 is not considered an exception because he ran with considerable establishment support and did not campaign to Clinton’s left except on his opposition to the Iraq war.)

So far, Sanders has failed to expand his base of support beyond college-educated white liberals — backing that could allow him to win in the contest’s first primary in New Hampshire, an overwhelmingly white state, but would not be enough in the rest of the country, where minority and moderate voters are key.

And for now, Vice President Joe Biden, who spent part of Labor Day marching in a parade with steelworkers in Pittsburgh, does not sound like a man ready to jump quickly into a campaign.

“I have to be honest with you and everyone who’s come to me: I can’t look you straight in the eye and say now I know I can do that,” he told an audience at an Atlanta synagogue late last week.

The bigger problem for Clinton is her inability to settle voter doubts about her truthfulness. A recent poll by Quinnipiac University found that the word voters most often used in describing Clinton was “liar.” Of course, the vast majority of poll respondents giving that answer were Republicans, who were not going to vote for Clinton in any event, but the results stoked anxiety among Democrats.

Clinton’s opponents long ago learned that when challenged, she often responds in ways that voters find unappealing. Since her days as first lady, they have used investigations of one alleged scandal after another to try to keep her on the defensive.

For that reason, the fall’s biggest event for the Democrats could be something that ostensibly has nothing to do with the campaign: On Oct. 22, Clinton is scheduled to testify before the House committee that has been investigating her.

david.lauter@latimes.com

Times staff writers Evan Halper, Lisa Mascaro, Seema Mehta and Michael A. Memoli contributed to this report.