Hillary polarization and why it matters

Ezra Klein objects to a John Sides post showing that Democrats and Republicans have the most divergent favorability ratings on Hillary:

John Sides' effort to quantify how polarizing the various candidates are is interesting but, ultimately, quite flawed. "Polarization" is not a quality intrinsic to the various candidates...

Rather, candidates become polarizing as the press, and the political world, polarizes reactions to them. Hillary has been in the public eye for decades, endured all manner of smears and controversies, and is thus quite polarizing. But that's a function of her time before the spotlights, not her personality.

...Take John Kerry. In January of 2004, his ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings 1.26, meaning he was net favorable, even though relatively few Americans knew his name. In the final poll before the election, his ratio was .87, meaning he was net unfavorable, despite almost everyone knowing his name. Currently, his ratio is .45, meaning people wouldn't spit on him if he were on fire. During each of these periods, public awareness of Kerry has increased. And during each of these periods, that awareness has fundamentally shifted the electorate's aggregate opinion of him. So too with Obama, or Huckabee, or Edwards. If any of them emerge their party's nominee, they will be smeared, and attacked, and lied about, and derided. They will become polarizing, not because they are polarizing people, but because they are participating in a polarizing process.

That's why I'm so uninterested in these arguments that so-and-so can bring us together. Anyone can look unifying and safe now. I'm sure that Bill Clinton, in 1992, running as a moderate Southerner atop promises to rid the Democratic Party of 80s-era orthodoxies, seemed like a pretty likable figure. By 1994, that wasn't so much the case. Obama, for all his virtues, will be smeared as a Muslim, or a former coke user, and undergo the same process. Edwards will be derided for his haircut, his house, his looks. Polarization happens. The question is who can endure it, survive it, and win despite it.

Doesn't this get it precisely backwards? 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.

To illustrate the point about the lack of convergence, let me quote from a post last year in which I show that Hillary started her presidential campaign way behind both Al Gore and John Kerry in terms of polarization:

To put Hillary's negatives in comparative perspective, let's see where she stands relative to Al Gore and John Kerry, the two previous Democratic presidential candidates. With 28 months to go before the 2008 election, her favorable/unfavorable rating is 54 percent favorable, 42 percent unfavorable according to the latest Post-ABC poll -- a ratio of 1.3:1. By contrast, the Post-ABC poll from July 1998 -- the comparable period for Gore -- shows that his favorable/unfavorable rating was 54 percent to 26 percent even though he was the sitting vice president. That is a ratio of 2.1:1. And two polls from late 2002 show that John Kerry's favorable/unfavorable ratings were 31 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable and 31 percent favorable, 13 percent unfavorable -- ratios of 4.4:1 and 2.3:1, respectively.

To sum up, Hillary Clinton is far more polarizing today than Al Gore was in 1998. And look what happened to Gore.

To bring this up to date, USA Today/Gallup currently has her at 50% unfavorable. In December 1999, Gore, the sitting vice president, had unfavorable ratings of 42% and 36% in two USA/Today Gallup polls. His unfavorables in that poll never exceeded 42% for the rest of the campaign. In November 2003, John Kerry, who has much less well known than either Hillary or Gore, had a unfavorable rating of 24% in the Gallup poll. His unfavorables never exceeded 44% in that poll for the rest of the campaign. In other words, Hillary is already more polarizing than either Gore or Kerry ever became during their races.

And even 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?

As I've said many times in my posts on Hillary's campaign, I'm not saying she's unelectable. The political environment is so favorable to Democrats that she could win, but there's good reason to think she would perform worse than Obama or Edwards.

(PS Kerry's numbers are especially awful now because Democrats are mad at him for losing in '04. If he had won, his numbers would obviously be much better.)

Comments

[Sean-Sean-B]

I agree. Democrats seem to vote for the person most likely to energize the conservative base against the candidate.

[vwcat]

Democrats seem to look for the most unappealing candidate to nominate.
Even when almost half of that candidate's own party say they won't vote for them.
What democrats do not understand about electability is that it is the most appealing and the heart candidate that gets elected.
when you pick one that your own party can't get excited about, why in the world do they think anyone else will? that is why we lose. Because we simply cannot figure that out.
Look at Reagan (hate to use him but,) He had nothing much to recommend him as a president. He was seen as a war monger. However, he was appealing and so the conservatives when crazy and they took alot of democrats with them. In the meantime we chose to run Mr. Excitement, Walter Mondale to run against him in 84.
All our democrats running are capable of standing up to the smear machine of the gop. What we need is someone who inspires like and positive feelings like obama or Edwards.
They can at least bring some republicans and indies with them.

[James]

Hillary is extremely divisive within our own Democratic Party. As a fairly active Democrat, I have learned that about half of my Democratic colleagues love Hillary, and the other half find her completely intolerable. Republicans, on the other hand, seem to be quite uniformly anti-Hillary, which begs the question of how she could possibly win in any general election. Nearly every Republican says (s)he will vote against Hillary, and approx. half of all Democrats tell me they would rather abstain, write in, or vote third party rather than vote for Hillary in the general. If Hillary becomes the Dem candidate, we will most certainly lose in 2008.