CNN's Inside Politics panel discussed Hillary Clinton's inability to define her economic message on Sunday, despite having been on the campaign trail for well over a year.
Clinton's Democratic primary challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) consistently hammered home his far-left, populist economics and hit Clinton for not being as true a progressive. Her strategy since clinching the nomination has been to attack Republican opponent Donald Trump, while she's used the vague slogan, "Stronger Together."
Clinton slammed Trump over his business record in an economic speech last week, quipping that all of his books written about business "seem to end at chapter 11."
"It's a clever line," CNN host John King said. "She's not great at reading from a prompter. She's not her husband. She's not President Obama ... We've asked this question at this table for months. If you were John Doe voters, Jane Doe voters from a battleground state, what is Hillary Clinton's central economic message? Close your eyes."
Associated Press reporter Lisa Lerer said there was a debate within the Democratic Party over whether it was enough for Clinton to simply run as an anti-Trump candidate or if she had to put forward her own message.
"It seems like her team has decided it's actually enough at this stage in the game to just run against him," she said. "It's a strategy that reminds me of what happened in [2012], where Democrats moved over the summer to define Mitt Romney as this out-of-touch plutocrat. They were on the ads constantly in Ohio doing that. Democrats are trying to repeat that playbook this year with Donald Trump."
Clinton has launched $23 million worth of ad buys in eight battleground states where Trump hasn't spend any money at all. Lerer remarked that "operations matter" and Trump didn't have the ground game to compete with Clinton at the moment.
"I think they know it's enough to not be anti-Trump," CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny said.
Clinton, despite her high unpopularity ratings, has the advantage of facing someone even more disliked than her. A CNN poll earlier this month showed 70 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Trump.