How Hillary's decision in May not to tie other Republicans to Trump might have changed the election

Through the end of May, the plan to “disaggregate” Trump, as it was described in one lengthy email, remained a source of frustration for Miranda, the campaign’s go-between on messaging at the DNC. In the same email, subject-lined “Problem with HFA [Hillary For America],” he argued that the campaign’s frame — that “Trump is much worse than regular Republicans” — would give down-ballot GOP candidates an “easy out” and put every Democrat not named Clinton at a possible disadvantage. (“It might be a good strategy ONLY for Clinton,” Miranda wrote.) Worse, he added, the strategy would put the party “at odds” with the its own broader message against Republicanism.

As Miranda put it to one colleague, Democrats had been building the case for years against an increasingly extreme GOP, drawing a line from the rise of hardline Tea Party figures to the fights over affirmative action, immigration, and same-sex marriage of the early- and mid-2000s, to as far back as Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy in the 1960s, Miranda said. His point was the same one Clinton used to make before the end of the primaries: that Republicans “made their bed and now they’re lying in it,” as Miranda said in the email. “Democrats couldn’t dump the approach,” he wrote, citing congressional leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who had been making the case he had in mind. “It’s worse than turning an aircraft carrier. We would lose 3/4 of the fleet.”