Top 2016 candidates struggle to change the subject

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Nearly six months out from the first votes of a presidential campaign, candidates should be fleshing out who they are and what they stand for. Instead, some of the best-known 2016 candidates are toting heavy baggage that’s proving to be a big distraction from the conversations they’d rather be having with the American people. Like it or not, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s still forced to talk about her email. And Jeb Bush is still trying to distinguish himself from his famous brother and father. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is stoking flames over immigration policy that are fueling his campaign for now but also risk consuming it. The current distractions for Clinton and Bush are inevitable to some extent but also partly their own making. For two such well-known candidates, the getting-to-know-you phase of the campaign requires a healthy dose of new ideas, says GOP pollster David Winston. Absent something new, “the story line tends to drift to the negative,” says Winston, and that trend is particularly pronounced in a time of general voter dissatisfaction with political discourse and the direction of the country. Neither candidate was able to keep from drifting off course, he says.

It’s not that hard to sit in a conference room and strategize about how to handle a potential problem. The problem is the other candidates and the media and the voters don’t always react to that strategy the way you want them to.

Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California’s political institute

While Clinton and Bush keep trying out new tactics to stow their unwanted baggage, Trump shows no inclination to move past the political flashpoint of immigration, even though some of his comments have been criticized by Republicans as well as Democrats. Trump seems happy to tap into a subset of voter disquiet, and to force GOP rivals to take a stand on proposals such as his call for a giant wall on the southern border and to deny automatic “birthright citizenship” to anyone born in the U.S. For now, that’s helping him “ride a wave having to do with his chutzpah,” says University of Texas political scientist Bruce Buchanan. But ultimately, Buchanan says, it could be a big problem for his candidacy and Republicans overall. You can bet the party that vowed to make nice with Hispanics after the GOP’s poor showing with Latino voters in 2012 didn’t aim for its candidates to spend August talking about “anchor babies." For all of the candidates, much of what’s being talked about in August 2015 could well be largely forgotten by the time people cast votes next year. But this summertime chatter is sure to contribute to the overall impressions of candidates that voters are developing.

It’s shaping the context for how voters make their decisions. You don’t want the initial thought in everybody’s mind to be, ‘Wow, they have a lot of baggage.’

GOP pollster David Winston