The two states Hillary Clinton needs to win to beat Donald Trump in the US election

Can Clinton recapture the magic that led her husband to power in 1992?

Clinton and Kaine, with their spouses, prepare to board a campaign bus out of Philadelphia (Getty)

What is it about the Clintons and bus tours? On Friday fresh-minted Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine set out on the morrow of the party convention in Philadelphia on a three-day tour of small towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio. 24 years ago, a newly crowned Democratic nominee named Bill Clinton and his running mate got into a bus to do the same thing.

1992 was the first US election that I covered and for me remains the most exciting. In some respects it mirrors this one. Both major party candidates, Bill Clinton and George HW Bush were failing to inspire. Both were seen to represent a discredited establishment. An eccentric Texas billionaire businessman called Ross Perot, with jug ears and a voice like chalk on blackboard, had entered the race that spring, railing away about the need to balance the budget. By June he was topping the polls. Then, just as the Democratic convention opened in New York in mid-July, he pulled out of the race.

The convention was a colossal success. The “double bubba” ticket of two young technocratic southerners, Arkansas’ governor Clinton and senator Al Gore of Tennessee, caught the national imagination. Their maddeningly catchy theme tune, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” was everywhere. Clinton/Gore got the mother of all convention bounces. The bus tour too was a smash, and they never trailed again – even though Perot jumped back into the contest in autumn, and ended up with 19 per cent of the popular vote.

If only history would repeat itself, Clinton must be thinking. She’s just come off a pretty good convention herself, as slick and well choreographed as the one in 1992. She’s unlikely to get a 1992-style bounce though; convention bounces ain’t what they used to be. And while her husband’s week-long bus trip seemed even then a harbinger of the ultimate victory, her shorter one is – not to put too fine a point on it – an unavoidable necessity.

Pennsylvania and Ohio are two classic rust belt states. The first has voted Democrat in the last six elections, but it is full of the disaffected blue-collar white voters who flock to Donald Trump. Obama carried it by a relatively comfortable 5.4 per cent margin over Mitt Romney in 2012. This time around though, Hillary Clinton is doing much worse than Obama among working class white men. Pennsylvania is up for grabs.

As for Ohio, carried twice by Obama, it enjoys legendary status as the ultimate swing state, having backed the winner in every election since 1964. It too has many workers and communities who feel crushed by globalisation and forgotten to the state. It too is an obvious target for Trump. Indeed if he is to win the White House, the real estate magnate will almost certainly win there.

For Clinton the converse is true. She starts out with a notable Democratic advantage in the Electoral College. Hang on to Pennsylvania and Ohio, and there’s virtually no way Trump can cobble together the 270 electoral votes needed to win. To do so, he must capture rust belt states in the Northeast. But if he can’t manage Pennsylvania, the most vulnerable of them, he’s unlikely to carry other, and more solidly Democratic ones like Michigan and Wisconsin. Game over.

Small towns in America’s former industrial heartlands are not natural Clinton territory. But she’s bringing ideas that should help her cause: plans for the biggest infrastructure spending programme since Dwight Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system in the 50s, plus a $10bn (£7.6bn) special fund to help small manufacturers switch to high-tech products. Expect many jabs at Trump, for promising to “Put America First,” while having many Trump brand items manufactured not in Pennsylvania or Ohio, but in China, India and Turkey.

Even so, another parallel with 1992 must cause Clinton concern: third party candidates. Despite the fact that discontent with the major party candidates is even higher than in 1992, there’s no Perot around – or not yet – scooping up 20 per cent of the vote. But just remember the impact of Ralph Nader in 2000 when his Green party won just 2.7 per cent. Ross Perot drew support equally from Democrats and Republicans. Nader though mostly took Democratic votes – enough to hand that razor-close election to George W Bush.

There’s a Green running this time, Jill Stein, who’s getting similar support in the polls to Nader 16 years ago. Most of it comes from the “Bernie [Sanders] or Bust” brigade on the liberal far left; in other words votes lost for Hillary. No less of a worry however is the Libertarian party ticket of former Republican Governors Gary Johnson of New Mexico and Bill Weld of Massachusetts.

Right now they’re scoring in the high single digits. But the whole election would be transformed were Johnson/Weld somehow to push that share to 15 per cent, qualifying them for the autumn’s televised debates. But even at 7 or 8 per cent they’re a factor. The roots of the Libertarian party may lie in a laid-back, small-government, socially liberal Republicanism. But right now Johnson and Weld seem to be taking more votes from Clinton than from Trump – not least young people who, try as she may, she cannot win over.

That of course was no problem for her husband and Al Gore. They, like almost every successful presidential ticket before or since, embodied the future. The young flocked to them. Hillary Clinton by contrast embodies the quarter century since 1992, during which she has been a fixture on the political centre stage. Bill is thinner, calmer and white-haired now. For all his folksy charisma, his every appearance at her side is a reminder of times gone by. Back then, a bus tour was a novelty and a bit of a lark. Can Hillary recapture the magic now?