Ezra Klein follows up on the Hillary polarization post I objected to with a LA Times op-ed on the subject. Here's the punchline:
Those numbers tell a couple of different stories. The first is that it's probably a mistake to compare Hillary Clinton with the other presidential hopefuls. Her many years as one of the most recognizable players in national politics leave her more comparable to a president running for reelection than a newcomer scrapping for a shot at the crown. As pollster Scott Rasmussen tells me, all the other candidates are going to see their negatives go up during the course of the campaign -- and if one of them ultimately wins the race, their negatives will go up even further. "The next president will get to where she is no matter who we elect," he said. It's not that the others are necessarily less polarizing than Clinton. It's that they're not as polarizing yet.
The other message of the Gallup numbers on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is that voters can change. Hillary Clinton's detractors like to argue that she can't win because her negatives are hard rather than soft -- meaning that people have already made up their minds about her and are not movable on the subject. But history suggests that opinions are rarely set in stone. Between 1992 and 1996, for instance, Bill Clinton flipped from a net favorable rating (the percentage favorable minus the percentage unfavorable) of negative 7% to positive 11% -- that's a shift of 18%, all of it upward. In November 2000, 60% of voters reported favorable feelings toward Bush, while a mere 34% disapproved. In November 2007, only 40% approve, while 55% can't find a kind word -- a net shift of 41%, downward. True, those flips happened over significantly longer spans of time than a single campaign, but the point remains: Voters are rarely unwilling to change their minds.
However, though Klein linked to my post, he failed to address the points that I made in his op-ed. Here's the first:
While any politician will of course become more polarizing as they rise in prominence, it doesn't follow that all of them will converge to some equilibrium level of polarization. The good politicians who endure, survive, and win usually do so by retaining some appeal to independents and moderates in the other party.
In other words, Hillary has become more polarizing than your average national political figure and Obama or Edwards might not be viewed as negatively. He implicitly dismisses this possibility.
The second point is even more important:
[E]ven if we concede that Obama or Edwards would eventually become as polarizing as Hillary, Klein's point still doesn't hold. Surely it's harder to win a general election when your opponents start out energized against you and almost half the electorate starts out with an unfavorable impression of you. Why would we think otherwise?
And while it's true that perceptions of a politician can change over time, does Klein have an example in which someone's favorables improved during a presidential campaign? The change in Bill Clinton's favorables from 1992-1996 is not a useful comparison because he was an incumbent benefiting from a favorable economy.
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