Ket’s see, the last candidate I was fired up to vote for was Barack Obama … in 2008. It was the right choice given the Republican opposition, but I certainly lost any enthusiasm for him.
The one before that … I don’t think there was one before that.
Well, Ok. But are you also in the subset of people who believe that if Hillary were more active in her campaigning she would successfully motivate you to be enthusiastic about her?
Well, no. Have no doubt I will vote for her should it be necessary, but I won’t be enthusiastic about it. If she rented me some hookers and bought me some blow, I could get a whole lot more enthusiastic for her, but that seems … unlikely. 
So? Unenthusiastic votes count for just as much.
Hey, I was just answering the question from the previous post.
Unenthusiastic votes count just as much, true, when they actually happen. But if it rains, or someone has an appointment, or a party…
I’m hoping Trunp has some dirt, or maybe just a big enough lie, to get one of his fellows out of the race before he himself becomes a casualty.
Well, she is raising oodles and oodles of money, so that ain’t nothing!
I’d say she’s running to win: she’s winning againstALL potential Republican nominees.
Name recognition. In 2014, ALL of the Democratic Senate incumbents were leading until a couple of months before the election. You can’t beat something with nothing, and until the Republicans are known by the vast majority of the voters, you’re essentially asking them if they support “Who the f*!(k?” or Clinton.
Well, “who the fuck?” shouldn’t be losing. As I recall, in 2012 Obama trailed the Generic Republican even though he was ahead of every actual candidate.
The economy sucked in 2012. It’s much better now.
They haven’t polled Clinton vs. generic Republican, unfortunately.
I agree that she’s focusing on winning overall and likely more focused on avoiding risk in the primaries at this point. I wouldn’t read too much in to the head to head comparisons. Those numbers show a very narrow difference based on who her competitor is. ISTR some similar results for Sanders head to head vs Republicans although with smaller margins. That might speak to the demographic advantage of having the D after her name than it being about her. Overwhelmingly the differences are smaller than the “unsure” chunk of the vote. I’d bet her campaign has a far better analysis of what that excluded and potentially decisive middle is thinking. It certainly supports the idea of focusing on them for the general instead of maximizing primary margins of victory while she still has a lead among Democrats.
Not unfortunately. It’s a meaningless poll. She’ll be running against an actual Repulbican, not a generic one.
Polls are all meaningless right now if you want to find out who is going to win. But they are very useful if you want to learn things about the political situation right now.
Polls against generic Republicans are useful because it tells you if your candidates are more or less popular than the party’s “brand”. If generic Republican beats Clinton but your actual Republicans don’t, then you either need new Republicans or better marketing of the ones you have.
Since right now all Republicans not named Bush or Trump have low name recognition, I’d expect them to underperform generic as well as Clinton. Still, I’d like to know if the voters would prefer a Republican to Clinton, and generic polls can tell you that.
270toWin has a rollup table of the Mclatchy-Marist head to head comparisons. Against all the Republicans on the main debate stage that aren’t named Trump fall she polls between 47-50. She leads by 5-10% against the same nine. Her numbers are pretty similar with the main source of difference being how many unsure voters there are. That probably gives a good feel for her current advantage against the field.
Trump is a whole different matter. She gets more support than against anyone in the field. Only Graham, Fiorina, and Gilmore trail by a bigger margin thanks to bigger unsure numbers. Trump is a pretty clear case of under performing.
That’s not approval, that’s presidential preference. In approval polls, between 35-70% don’t know who most of the candidates are, which means they have no idea if they prefer Clinton or the Republican unless they are already committed Democrats.
Polls don’t mean crap. Right now about 90% of the people have already decided they will vote for the party of their preference in 2016 as well as 2020. The so-called “independent” voters actually have a party that they will vote for while holding their noses and/or hiding their faces. Hillary is going to get all of the Democratic voters and whichever stooge wins the Republican nomination will get all the Republican votes. We can take the electoral map and fill in all but about five states right now. Unless Republicans sweep all the truly undecided states, Hillary wins.
Nate Silver would disagree with most of that. There are a lot more states that can go either way than you think, and a much wider possible spread of popular vote outcomes than you think.