This is more of a “Hillary’s terrible” poll than a “Trump’s viable” one, although I’d point out right at the top for the benefit of all the Jeb fans out there (are there any?) that Trump now fares better against her than Mr. Electability does. He trails by six while Bush trails by nine, another bit of evidence from this week’s CNN polling that nominating Bush 3.0 is as hard a sell in its own way as nominating Trump is. A month ago, I would have questioned Matt Latimer’s claim that Hillary secretly wants to face Jeb in the general election. Increasingly that seems like a simple, and understandable, truth.
On the other hand, I feel like Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in that old “SNL” skit: I can’t believe we’re losing to this person.
Among American adults generally, her favorable rating is 44/53, the lowest recorded in a CNN poll in 14 years. Check the crosstabs and you’ll find that in more than 20 years of polling, she’s never sunk as low as 55 percent unfavorability among that group, which is where she stands right now with registered voters. It may very well be that after two decades of Clinton scandals, Hillary Clinton’s never been as unpopular as she is right now. There’s a lot that goes into that — partisanship as the presidential campaign heats up, deep Democratic disappointment over her impossibly lame retail skills on the stump, and of course the growing seriousness of her mishandling of classified documents. Five months ago, when the news about her private server first broke, the public was evenly split at 51/47 on whether she did something wrong. Today: 56/39. We should crack 60 percent with no problem as the number of classified documents inappropriately stored on the server continues to rise.
Another grim milestone in this poll: She’s sunk below 50 percent against Bernie Sanders.
That’s no outlier. Take a look at the RCP poll average and you’ll find Hillary cruising along at support in the high 50s or low to mid-60s until the start of this month, when suddenly she slips around 10 points and has yet to recover. In the last four national polls, including this one, she’s at 51, 52, 49, and now 47 percent, her lowest mark yet. How seriously you take that decline depends in part on how likely you think it is that Biden will get in. When CNN asked Democrats who their second choice for president is, 26 percent said Hillary versus just 16 percent who said Sanders, which presumably means that if Biden were to say definitively that he’s not running, Hillary would gain a few points on Sanders by picking up the lion’s share of Biden voters. On the other hand, Biden himself was the second choice of 37 percent of Democrats; if he jumps in and zooms past Sanders in the polls, some Bernie fans may jump ship to Biden thinking that he’s their best chance to stop Hillary. The primary right now is, to some extent, a referendum on Clinton. What does it tell you, then, that she’s below 50 percent support?
Here’s my favorite of the many, many photoshops circulating on Twitter after Hillary’s trainwreck press conference yesterday. Oh, by the way: When registered Democratic voters were asked whether Biden should run, 53 percent said yes — which, coincidentally, equals the precise share of the primary electorate that’s not supporting Hillary in this poll. Not Hillary 53, Hillary 47?
'Don't worry sweetheart, Uncle Joe will take it from here.' #Hillary2016 #BidenTime pic.twitter.com/N23i4WBDO5
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) August 19, 2015
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