Polls: Hillary slipping among young people and women

Obama Coalition, where art thou? The latest polls on Hillary Clinton, one in New Hampshire and one focused on college students, shows the former Secretary of State losing ground with two important groups of the powerful combination of voters that carried President Obama to the White House two times over.

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First, young people, from whom Obama drew so much of his enthusiasm and volunteer support are not exactly flocking to the second Clinton:

In the nationwide survey of college students enrolled at two or four-year universities, just 18 percent selected the former secretary of state as the Democratic candidate who holds their support. When the survey was first commissioned in mid-June, Clinton led Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden by nearly 20 points each, with 40 percent support.

While Clinton, the long-presumed Democratic nominee, has fallen 22 points in less than three months, the percentage of college students backing Sanders as their Democratic candidate of choice has climbed nearly 34 percent, putting the self-described socialist at 59 percent support among the undergraduate respondents.

If you look at cross tabs for these polls, you’ll find the younger the demographic on the Democratic side, the less interested they are in electability over policy. Sanders voters are primarily interested in him because of his positions, not his ability to win the White House, and there are more voters like that in each progressively younger cohort. The opposite is also true. The older the cohort, the more likely Democrats are to care about electability vs. positions. As Bernie Sanders has risen, so has the age of the average Hillary Clinton supporter.

In New Hampshire, a poll showing Sanders in the lead again shows Hillary with weakness among a key group of voters her team imagined would be inevitable supporters—women:

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The Monmouth University poll shows Sanders ahead of Clinton by 7 points at 43% to Clinton’s 36%. Vice President Joe Biden, who is still considering a bid, has the support of 13% of New Hampshire Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. When Biden is removed from the race, Sanders still leads Clinton by 7 points.

And Sanders has even eked ahead of Clinton among women voters, 42% to 38%. “Sanders has certainly cut into Clinton’s core constituencies, but his ultimate success may ride on how many new voters he can get to the polls,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Clinton leads among registered Democrats, but Sanders has a wider advantage among independents and new voters.

Five points is no joke. Once again, the Hillary machine seems to have relied too much on inevitability and a drive to “make history” with the first woman president in place of trying to be a good candidate who makes people excited.

Methinks this line of attack isn’t going to help her with her problems on the idealistic left. David Brock to the rescue, y’all!

WASHINGTON — A super PAC backing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is going negative, circulating an email that yokes her chief rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to some of the more controversial remarks made by Jeremy Corbyn, the United Kingdom’s new Labour Party leader, including his praise for the late Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader who provided discounted fuel to Vermont in a deal supported by Sanders.

Clinton’s camp has long said it has no plans to attack Sanders. But the super PAC, called Correct the Record, departed from its defense of Clinton’s record as a former secretary of state in an email Monday that compares Sanders with Corbyn. Correct the Record, led by Clinton ally David Brock, also has sent trackers after Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley…

The more serious stretch comes as the email highlights how Sanders helped negotiate a program with Venezuela’s national oil company in 2006 that provided discounted heating oil assistance to low-income Vermonters. The senator said it was “not a partisan issue,” in the state, which was the sixth to make the deal. His support for the program was apparently enough to merit a mention, since Corbyn has written that the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez’s “electoral democratic credentials are beyond reproach.”

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This kind of cultural crossover can’t be a good sign, either. Buzzfeed taking shots:

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