On Thursday, some of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign officials held a briefing for about three dozen members of the 2016 hack pack. Their message was a positive one. “The view inside the campaign is that voters are concerned about kitchen-table issues Clinton wants to talk about, rather than media reports and Republican attacks on the [Clinton] foundation, the officials said,” Vox’s Jonathan Allen reported. “There’s no conflict between her promise to represent ‘everyday Americans’ and the access big donors have had to Clinton and her husband over the years, they said, arguing that voters will trust her to represent them in the White House.”
That was partly spin, of course. There is no end in sight to the stories about the finances of the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton e-mails, or the activities of some of the Clintons’ associates. But as spring rolls into summer, Team Brooklyn has successfully accomplished its two initial goals: heading off the possibility of a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination and surviving a barrage of negative publicity that was inevitable at some stage, and which was, therefore, best confronted early on.
The entry into the Democratic contest by Bernie Sanders was welcome from a Clintonite perspective, because it filled a potentially dangerous vacuum. With his long record of service to progressive causes, Sanders is popular enough to garner a decent-sized following among liberal Democrats, but he’s almost certainly too far to the left to represent a serious threat to Hillary. So far, at least, his presence has been more of a problem for Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, who is set to officially announce his candidacy on Saturday. As I noted back in March, O’Malley is a serious figure who demands some respect. As governor, he eliminated the death penalty, legalized gay marriage, and championed various good-government initiatives. But with Sanders already out there on the stump, O’Malley has struggled to gain traction.
A new poll of likely Democratic voters conducted by Quinnipiac University illustrates the scale of the task that is facing Clinton’s challengers. The survey, which was carried out from May 19th to May 26th, showed her getting fifty-seven per cent of the vote. Sanders was in second place, with fifteen per cent. O’Malley got just one per cent, and so did two other possible candidates, Jim Webb, a former U.S. senator from Virginia, and Lincoln Chafee, a former governor and U.S. senator from Rhode Island. Of course, it is early in the process, and anything could happen between now and the end of the primaries. At this stage, though, Clinton is sitting pretty.
Something similar, if somewhat less definitive, could be said of her position vis-à-vis her potential Republican opponents. Opinion polls positing head-to-head matchups with likely G.O.P. candidates have consistently shown Clinton winning, and the Quinnipiac survey was no exception. It showed her with double-digit leads over Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, two of the Republican front-runners. Interestingly, the closest hypothetical contests were with Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, and Florida senator Marco Rubio, whom some in the Clinton camp have reportedly identified as her biggest potential threat. Clinton’s leads over both Paul and Rubio were four points.
The Quinnipiac poll also contained some valuable clues as to how Clinton has been able, so far, to navigate all of the negative media coverage she has received while sustaining relatively little damage to her overall polling numbers. In terms of the level of personal trust that voters have in Clinton, the drip-drip-drip of stories does seem to be having an effect. Fifty-three per cent of respondents to the Quinnipiac survey said that they do not consider her to be “honest and trustworthy,” while only thirty-nine per cent said that they did. Among self-identified Independents, the numbers were even more lopsided: sixty-one per cent to thirty-one per cent.
The number of people who question Clinton’s trustworthiness must be of concern to her team, and it’s a figure that Republican ad-makers and opposition-research shops will be seeking to increase. But this issue needs to be weighed against the fact that Presidential elections are about leadership—and most Americans think of Clinton as an experienced and strong leader. One of the survey questions asked, “Would you say that Hillary Clinton has strong leadership qualities or not?” Sixty per cent of respondents said yes, and thirty-seven per cent said no. Among Independents, fifty-eight per cent answered yes, and thirty-eight per cent said no.
These findings suggest that voters are more sophisticated than they are sometimes given credit for. Rather than looking at politicians in black-and-white terms, they are able to size up candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, and to reach an over-all view based on what they are looking for in a leader. At a time when the world seems like an increasingly dangerous place and a majority of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track, perceived strength and decisiveness may well count for a great deal. “Can you get low marks on honesty and still be a strong leader?” said Tim Malloy, the assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, in a news release. “Sure you can. Hillary Clinton crushes her democratic rivals and keeps the GOP hoard [sic] at arm’s length.”
For Clinton’s campaign team in Brooklyn Heights, that means things are on track. Of course, they won’t necessarily stay that way. The campaign is just getting started, the country is more or less equally divided, and winning a third term of office isn’t easy for any party. Now it’s up to Clinton to finish up her “listening tour,” lay out her policy platform, and take it to the Republicans.
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