A short walk from the scene of one of the most notorious incidents in 20th century American politics, Hillary Clinton was braced this week for another struggle that could define a political generation.
Her speech at Kent State University came nearly 50 years after national guardsmen opened fire on antiwar protesters here, killing four and symbolising a decade of social upheaval.
On Monday the campus was as calm as the dozens of college venues that have served as peaceful backdrops for a mostly one-sided 2016 election campaign.
But polls conducted since new FBI email revelations on Friday suggest waning enthusiasm among some Democratic voters may change that. A new poll for ABC News and the Washington Post puts Donald Trump one point ahead for the first time since May, and Clinton’s lead in a rolling average of national polls has shrunk to barely two percentage points, although the vagaries of the electoral college system mean she remains the favourite to win next Tuesday.
But whoever emerges as the next president on 8 November may face a country as divided as it has been since that fateful shooting during the Nixon administration.
Clinton’s primary focus on the campaign trail this week is her opponent. “This is one of those make or break moments for the United States,” she tells the crowd in Kent, after a chilling introduction from a former nuclear launch officer who warns that Trump’s finger on the button could lead to a crisis of confidence among the military.
“If I were back in the launch chair I would have no faith in his judgment and would live in constant fear of him getting it wrong,” warns Bruce Blair, who served in the US air force as part of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile launch control team.
Yet the former secretary of state is also warning of a lack of trust between Democrats and other parts of the national security establishment.
Since FBI director James Comey stunned them on Friday by announcing fresh inquiries into Clinton’s potentially illegal use of a private email server while secretary of state, her campaign has chosen to go to war with the bureau almost as aggressively as against Trump.
Campaign manager Robby Mook accused Comey of “jaw-dropping” and irresponsible behaviour, while the most senior Democrat in Congress, Senate minority leader Harry Reid, went bare-knuckle even by Washington standards: claiming Comey was breaking the law and covering up collusion between Trump and Russia. Barack Obama stood alone in questioning whether it was really plausible that the FBI was trying to pick sides.
Onboard Clinton’s plane the mood was notably tenser since Comey’s letter, but there was also a steely determination not to let the FBI knock the campaign off course.
“We’ve got our work cut out for us. It’s going to be a flat-out race to the finish,” said one top adviser on Tuesday. “There’s some states where it’s going to be close.”
For now the big fear among staff is less that Comey’s intervention will change next Tuesday’s result – though they acknowledge this is considerably more possible than a week ago – but that it will reduce chances of Democrats winning back control of Congress and hang like a cloud over her victory parade.
The same impeachment threat that dogged the second term of her husband’s administration could wreck a first term in which she is forced to battle a Republican Congress even more polarised than that faced by Obama.
For now, the strategy is to attack the FBI and worry about the consequences later.
“We are really just focused on winning the election,” Mook told reporters when asked if Clinton could ever work with Comey if elected.
In theory FBI directors are appointed for 10-year terms to avoid precisely such political entanglements, but few would deny Comey is now already fully enmeshed in a row with the potential to damage the integrity of both offices of state.
Team Clinton is pressing hard for early answers, but increasingly resigned to the fact they may not come before Tuesday.
“We are completely confident that whenever this particular review of these emails is complete it will reinforce the conclusions from this summer and won’t reveal anything new,” replied Mook when pressed on whether this will drag on until the inauguration in January.
Some critics are less convinced the issue will go away so easily. “Regardless of what secretary Clinton did or didn’t do,” says Doug Schoen, a Fox News commentator and former pollster for Bill Clinton who says the issue has changed his support for Hillary Clinton. “I am now convinced that we will be facing the very real possibility of a constitutional crisis with many dimensions and deleterious consequences should Secretary Clinton win the election.”
It is a narrative eagerly pushed by the Republican campaign. “She would be under protracted criminal investigation and probably a criminal trial, I would say. So we’d have a criminal trial of a sitting president,” Trump claimed at a rally in Michigan where he quoted Schoen.
But Trump is open to accusations of creating the potential for his own constitutional crisis too. He caused consternation among Republican politicians at the final presidential debate when he refused to say whether he would accept the result of the election if he loses.
Though there is as little evidence for Trump’s vote-rigging claims as there currently is for his theory that Comey has found a “motherlode” of new evidence against Clinton, both issues are firing up an already angry base to levels of suspicion not seen in US politics for decades.
To make matters worse, if the election result is disputed, the US supreme court may be unable to act as an arbiter, as it did between Al Gore and George W Bush in 2000. Republican refusal to consider Obama’s replacement for Antonin Scalia has left court justices split 4-4, and may continue to stymie a new appointment even after the election.
Democrats fear Trump supporters will attempt to intimidate voters at polling stations, but violence could also erupt from both sides if activists are not prepared to accept a disputed result, especially one marred by claims of FBI or Russian interference.
While the thuggish behaviour of some Trump supporters has tended to capture attention inside his rallies, what disturbances that have spilled over on to the streets this year – at events in Chicago and California, for example – have tended to involve anti-Trump protesters clashing with police.
Whether it ends with something as dramatic as the Kent State shootings of 1970 remains to be seen, but the Democratic campaign is leaving nothing to chance with an increasingly negative campaign to underline the risks at stake.
“I prefer for us to be motivated by what we’re for, not what we’re against,” Clinton told a rally in Cincinnati. “But I also think it’s prudent to imagine what could happen if we don’t do our part. And when in the future somebody asks you, maybe your kids or your grandkids, ‘What did you do when everything was on the line? I want you to be able to say: ‘I voted for a better, fairer, stronger America.’”
