On the eve of “(Possibly) Decisive Tuesday”, whether a campaign sets a poverty goal probably doesn’t matter.

Yet, it’s helpful (for our work) to continue this dialogue about whether it was a good plan for Senator Clinton to announce her goal to cut poverty at all.

Is it a good strategy? Shawn suggests that Senator Clinton needed to have a plan in the primary and cites a Huffington Post commentary written by a former Edwards campaign staffer as evidence.

A few reactions:

• Voters are not clamoring for this – even in the primary, and even in the hard hit areas of southeastern Ohio, where poverty rates are relatively high. In February, the Gallup Poll asked voters about “the most important problem facing the country” and just 2 percent named poverty/hunger/homelessness.

  
  The dynamic might (possibly!) be different if the primary had come down to a race between Clinton and Edwards. In that case, the target for cutting poverty might have been used by Edwards to illustrate a difference between the candidates. But, that isn’t where we ended up. Moreover, in that scenario, the campaign would likely have undermined the party and the policy goals…given what we know about opposition to the policies and voter preferences.

• We know that some people (democrats and low-income voters) are persuaded by the sympathy frame (the one that the word “poverty” calls up for voters) to support a limited set of policies. But, this language actually decreases support for a living wage. Moreover, we also know that an economic lens moves these same voters and others to support more of our policy goals!
  
  So, if there is no true demand for a goal to cut poverty and it won’t help add new voters, why not use an economic case to promote the same larger policy agenda without a damaging poverty headline? (In fact, the Clinton campaign appears to have included most of the same policy in an earlier announcement about her economic plans.)
• Why does this matter at all? Maybe it doesn’t. But, I’m afraid it could. And I’d prefer a candidate who is thinking beyond the next primary and stays focused on the goal of building political space and public will for the policy goals. Or at the very least, one who doesn’t take the risk of underming the policy in order to win.

  
  Some time ago, Rachel Gragg (one of inclusion’s co-founders) co-authored an article outlining a topic we’ve all discussed at length: the advantages of “winning by losing well.” The poverty debate provides a classic example of this imperative not to sacrifice our larger policy goals for the sake of an incremental or different advance, particularly when that advance actually undermines the shared agenda for the long term. By advancing a plan to set a target for cutting poverty, Senator Clinton sets up a problematic future, and one that threatens to undermine the policy goals.

  Let’s assume (for the sake of this posting) that Senator Clinton were to win the nomination. She could then be forced to campaign on her poverty goal in the general election. This would allow opponents to raise the arguments outlined by the Heritage Foundation in response to her announcement last week.

  And if she ended up in the White House, we can expect that some advocates would demand that she make good on her plan to call for a target to cut poverty. And that would likely fail, as we’ve outlined before. In the process – a lot of the policy we need to implement could be undermined by the debate over whether these policies are the ones our government should adopt to “cut poverty”.

No other leading candidate remaining the race has adopted a goal to cut poverty. I hope it stays that way.