Hillary Clinton and her supporters are probably telling themselves not to be alarmed by the latest CNN/ORC poll. They must acknowledge that the headlines will rightly trumpet the fact that in just two months the former First Lady has gone from a net plus 11 percent positive rating to a negative four percent in terms of her favorability. Just as bad if not worse are the numbers that tell us that clear majorities of Americans don’t consider her honest, trustworthy, care about them, or inspire confidence. But Clinton still has a staggering 46 percent lead over any other Democrat and leads all Republican contenders in head-to-head matchups, although not by the same large margins that she once enjoyed. That means that no matter what most Americans think about her, she is certain to be the Democratic nominee and head toward November 2016 with, at worst, an even chance of winning the presidency. That’s not a bad place to be for any presidential candidate 17 months before the election. But the more one drills down into Hillary’s numbers, the less confident Democrats should be.
The Clinton camp will say that once their campaign cranks up and begins spending up to $2 billion on selling the country on Hillary’s greatness and trashing Republicans, the current slide will be reversed. To some extent, they may be right. As President Obama proved in 2012, if you are able to define your opponents with ads that slime their reputations as well as negative coverage from a helpful mainstream liberal media, half the battle will already be won.
But Hillary’s rising negatives point to the basic problem facing Democrats in 2016. We have been endlessly lectured that the Democrats’ main advantage was and remains a demographic one with women and minorities voting for them in numbers sufficient to offset any GOP strengths elsewhere. That’s true, but focusing solely on that breakdown ignores the fact that the Democrats’ real advantage was in having a candidate that a majority of Americans liked and, to some extent, trusted. Though his charms were lost on most Republicans, Barack Obama was and, to some extent still is, a magical political figure. He was not only liked by most voters he also made them feel good about themselves because of his historical status as our first African-American president. Hillary may hope that being the first female president will have the same resonance, but that may be more wishful thinking than hard analysis. As much as her identity as a woman will be a huge positive factor for her candidacy, that enthusiasm is tempered by the negative view that most Americans have about her personally. Though liberals keep telling us that the Clinton Cash scandals, Benghazi, and other Clinton problems are right-wing media conspiracies, they appear to have taken a toll on Clinton’s image.
Unlike most of the Republican candidates who must struggle to become better known and then try to avoid being defined by Democratic attacks, Hillary’s not only has universal name recognition but her identity is so fixed in the public imagination that it’s not clear that negative ads would even do all that much damage to her. Large numbers of Americans like her and nothing will change that. At the same time, an equally large group dislikes her so intensely that virtually nothing could make them support her. That puts her in a far less formidable position than Obama had in either of his presidential runs. Even if we concede that the Democrats start out with a stranglehold on 247 Electoral College votes to the Republicans having 206 with only 85 toss-ups that will determine the outcome.
Winning those key swing states will require the sort of enthusiasm that Obama inspired among the base. Can Hillary have the same sort of appeal? Since hard-core Democrats don’t care about the Clintons’ scandals, the answer is maybe. But Clinton will need to do more than mobilize her base. The most discouraging numbers in the CNN poll isn’t so much those terrible numbers about trustworthiness. It’s the fact that her favorability among independents is so poor, with a 54-41 negative result.
There are some other interesting facts to be gleaned from the CNN poll on the Republican side. In terms of who is ahead among the huge GOP field, the results are as useless as that of any other national poll. The leading candidates are all bunched together with only a few percentage points separating them and those on the bottom, like Carly Fiorina and newly declared candidate Lindsey Graham barely registering any support. That tells us nothing about who is set up to do well in the early voting states or which of them has any real advantage over the others.
What is significant is that Jeb Bush, the person many anointed as the Republican frontrunner and the one best suited to win a general election, is doing worse against Clinton in head-to-head matchups than any of the others. Even worse is the fact that poll respondents identified Bush more with the past than the future by a 62-34 percent margin. That has to be extremely frustrating for him, as he hasn’t held office in over 8 years and Clinton who has played a key role in the last two Democratic administrations gets a pro-future rating by a puzzling 51-45 percent margin. It seems obvious that a lot of people are confusing him with his older brother or father, but it may also be another piece of evidence that a lot of Americans don’t like the idea of a third Bush in the White House. That puts the conventional wisdom about the inevitability of a Bush-Clinton general election very much in doubt.
Marco Rubio had better news since he not only led the pack with an admittedly meager 14 percent but was also the most popular second choice. He also had the highest rating of being identified with the future of any candidate from either party.
Taken as a whole, none of this data should change our evaluations of what sets up to be a Clinton coronation for the Democrats, a confusing scrum for the GOP, and a general election in which both sides have a chance. That’s not terrible news for Clinton, but it shows that this will be a much more competitive election than the last two presidential contests. That means Democrats who think they can’t lose the presidency need to think again.
