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Is Hillary Clinton really unelectable?
There was a very good discussion on ThisWeek that really should be heeded. Supporters of Hillary Clinton are likely to be upset but instead must be warned that she is definitely not a shoo-in.
“To me this is not a campaign problem,” said Matthew Dowd. “This is a candidate problem. If you take a look at the data on her over time, the place where she drops is when she enters the national scene as a candidate. Every time she enters the national scene as a candidate she falls in the polls. That’s just what happened this year. If you just take a look at this. Ignore tactics. Ignore all these things. Take a look at her numbers. And you look at her numbers and you look at the dynamics of the country, where the country thinks we are off on the wrong track, where the country wants a change in policy from Obama, and the President’s job approval is in the forties. All of those dynamics say she is unelectable. Can she win? Yes. But she can only win if the Republicans nominate an equally unelectable candidate or she disqualifies herself.”
Matthew Dowd omitted causality. Her polls likely drop whenever she gets on the national scene because that is when she is attacked from an effective GOP misinformation machine. It is not hard to forget that in the early years of the Obama administration when her poll numbers were high, she was being praised by Republicans as a method to diss the President. Now that she is running there attacks are directly against her. The polls reflect that.
That said, in the last several years the Clintons did very little to inoculate themselves from the fire they knew would come if she ran for president. While it is likely that everything they did is legal, their methods may have left the door open for the false narrative being waged against Hillary Clinton now. If the Republicans nominate a good candidate and Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, Matthew Dowd is absolutely correct.
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