According to political insiders polled by The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination. But contradictory predictions about her chances in the general election abound. Marshall Wittman, a conservative turned centrist Democrat, is strangely optimistic, while Bob Kuttner, the liberal editor of The American Prospect, is more cautious.
So as part of my continuing series on Hillary 2008, I decided to take a look at her favorability ratings over time in National Journal's online Poll Track archive, starting before she joined the Senate in 2000 and continuing up to the present. These are a key indicator of overall perceptions of a political figure before they run for office. The wording of the questions and the number of choices differ between polls, so a useful common metric is the ratio of favorable to unfavorable perceptions, formed by dividing the proportion of favorable responses by the proportion of unfavorable responses.
The key question: Has Hillary improved her image as much as her supporters claim?
The poll results suggest that perceptions of Hillary have improved since 2003, but only back to the levels of 2000-2001. Moreover, she remains highly polarizing, with unfavorable perceptions at or above 40 percent in most national polls.
The argument that Wittman and others make is that any Democratic candidate will be subject to vicious attacks:
It is far too soon to endorse any candidate for '08. But what I am saying is that faint hearted progressives should not be dissuaded from supporting someone because they fear he/she would be subject to vicious right wing attacks. The truth is that no one is safe from the [vast right-wing] conspiracy. Take it from someone who knows this crowd intimately.
But the crucial difference is whether those attacks stick. Negative stereotypes of Hillary have deep roots, and many voters are likely to revert to them once she comes under serious attack. I worked for a Nevada Senate candidate in 2000 (Ed Bernstein) who had similar image problems to Hillary. He was well-known to most Nevadans and had a highly defined, polarizing personality. Over the course of the campaign, we built up his favorable/unfavorable ratings from 21/33 in late 1999 to 44/36 in Sept. 2000, and pulled within four points of our opponent in a DSCC poll. But when the Republicans unloaded a million dollars in negative ads on us, all that went out the window. Voters snapped back to their initial perceptions of Bernstein, his unfavorables spiked over 50 percent, the DSCC dropped us, and the race was over. Hillary is a better politician than Bernstein, but I think the dynamics are likely to be similar. As I've said before, a bad economy could put her over the top, but the combination of a polarizing persona and a liberal track record is likely to be devastating to her chances.
i'm not seeing a 21/33 ratio on hillary's chart. i'm sure your candidate was a fine one, but hillary's favorables are much higher than his.
if they whipped out the attack machine on a decorated vietnam hero, they're gonna do it to anyone. all we can do is run the best possible candidate and do a better job of deflecting the gobsful of crap republicans throw at them.
Posted by: jami | July 17, 2005 at 03:09 PM
Her unfavorables have spiked at or near 50 percent several times, including a 1996 CNN poll and multiple CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls since. She's not far off from those numbers. In any case, I'm not saying she's identical to Bernstein, but she has a similar profile.
Posted by: Brendan Nyhan | July 18, 2005 at 07:52 AM