Hillary Clinton Takes Aim at Voters Drifting Toward Third Party

Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies, unnerved by the tightening presidential race, are making a major push to dissuade disaffected voters from backing third-party candidates, and pouring more energy into Rust Belt states, where Donald J. Trump is gaining ground.

With Mrs. Clinton enduring one of the rockiest stretches of her second bid for the presidency, her campaign and affiliated Democratic groups are shifting their focus to those voters, many of them millennials, who recoil at Mr. Trump, her Republican opponent, but now favor the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

While still optimistic that the race will turn decisively back in Mrs. Clinton’s favor after the debates, leading Democrats have been alarmed by the drift of young voters toward the third-party candidates.

The principal “super PAC” supporting Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, Priorities USA Action, has concluded from its polling and other research that the reluctance to embrace the Democratic nominee among those who intensely dislike Mr. Trump is not going away and must be confronted.

“We’ll be launching a multimillion-dollar digital campaign that talks about what’s at stake and how a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump, who is against everything these voters stand for,” said Justin Barasky, a strategist for Priorities USA.

Mrs. Clinton may also get an assist from one Democrat who has been largely quiet about the race, but can testify to the importance of resisting the third-party temptation: former Vice President Al Gore. Her staff has had conversations with aides to Mr. Gore about bringing him onto the campaign trail to emphasize the importance of supporting Mrs. Clinton if they want to make progress on combating climate change.

“I can assure you from personal experience that every vote counts,” Mr. Gore wrote in an email to The New York Times on Thursday.

More immediately, the Clinton campaign on Saturday will dispatch two political figures who enjoy a passionate following among young liberals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to Ohio, where public polls show Mrs. Clinton has slipped into a statistical dead heat with Mr. Trump.

Democrats say that if the race is close in its final stretch, some of the voters who do not want to see Mr. Trump elected may shift on their own accord to Mrs. Clinton to prevent a Trump presidency. But after spending much of the summer hammering Mr. Trump, through both ads and stump speeches, it appears Mrs. Clinton has convinced many voters that Mr. Trump is not qualified to be president but has failed to win them over to her own candidacy.

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