Hillary Clinton's poll numbers Down

Hillary Clinton's poll numbers signal trouble ahead

 

6/2/15 7:32 PM EDT

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Hillary Clinton has a numbers problem.
No question, as her retinue of aides and supporters is quick to point out, she still polls better than any of her putative Republican rivals. And yes, it was inevitable that as she moved squarely into the political arena, Americans would see her as less of an above-the-fray stateswoman and more of a partisan Democrat. And of course it’s still June 2015 — six months before any actual voters will be picking sides in an Iowa caucus room, and well over a year before the main event.

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But still: Her untrustworthy ratings are stubbornly high, and perhaps most alarming of all for Team Hillary, the “so-called scandals,” as Clinton campaign operatives like to refer to them, are starting to take their toll on her favorability numbers, sending chills down the spines of Democrats who have put all their eggs in the Hillary basket.
It’s a huge turnabout from September 2011, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the widely admired globe-trotting diplomat, logged her highest favorability rating ever in a CNN poll — 69 percent.
In a new CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday, she was down to 46 percent. Even worse for her, the poll showed Clinton with her highest unfavorability ratings of the past 14 years — 50 percent, putting her underwater. A separate poll released Tuesday by The Washington Post and ABC News found that Clinton’s favorability was just 45 percent, the lowest in that survey since April 2008, when she was in the middle of a tough primary fight against Barack Obama.

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Campaign operatives and independent pollsters said they always expected Clinton’s numbers to drop after she changed status from nonpartisan international problem-solver to declared, partisan presidential candidate — though perhaps not so far, so fast.
Outside the campaign, however, some Democrats viewed the sagging poll numbers with concern. The problem, they said, is how quickly Clinton seems to be draining the tank of goodwill with which she left the State Department. Her long-term problem, Democratic operatives said, is that it’s harder to turn negative opinions around, and the later the politicization of Hillary Clinton could begin, the better. No matter how low-key her launch was intended to be, the politics clearly seeped in early.

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“I’m sure when they look at these numbers they’re saying, ‘Thank God it’s June and not February 2016,” Democratic consultant Donna Brazile said on CNN on Tuesday, responding to the new batch of polling results.
Other polls have showed Clinton losing support on her right flank, raising questions about her ability to win critical swing states such as Ohio and Florida. “At this stage it’s not a huge number,” Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said of the loss of support among Republicans and independents. “But the question is where it goes from here.”

She might not have hit bottom yet. Already, those “so-called scandals” seem to have left Clinton slightly down from where she was at this point in her first presidential run — the one she lost to Obama. A CNN/ORC poll in June 2007 showed 51 percent of respondents viewing her favorably, versus 44 percent unfavorably. But that year, she had actually ticked up 2 percentage points from the March survey. This time around, her poll numbers have been on a steady decline since she left Foggy Bottom. Somewhat paradoxically, Clinton’s numbers for “leadership” have remained strong, while her numbers for “honest and trustworthy” have slipped, according to Quinnipiac pollster Tim Malloy.
Defending Clinton, campaign officials say she’s Teflon: She’s been the subject of sustained Republican attacks for two months, they note, yet still polls well in head-to-head match-ups and remains in good standing with Democratic voters.
In a background briefing with reporters last week, senior campaign officials said their own internal polling showed no widespread deterioration of Clinton’s position due to questions surrounding her email use or the Clinton Foundation. And a Des Moines Register poll released Saturday showed Clinton shrugging off fresh challenges from Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley — 57 percent of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers said she was still their first choice, up 1 percent from January.
Campaign surrogates argued, too, that Clinton is well-positioned relative to her opponents. “Hillary Clinton is in strong shape for both [the nomination and general election], while the leading Republican candidates are bunched together and barely register 10 percent in the polls of their own primary,” said Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the pro-Clinton group Correct the Record.
That’s true: Clinton was at 60 percent to Sanders’ 10 percent in the CNN poll, while eight Republicans were crammed between 7 percent and 14 percent.

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