“A fresh face that runs a great campaign”? Are the Republicans going to nominate a unicorn? If you’re going to posit hypotheticals like that, could you at least try to link them to reality?
Who is even remotely in the wings on the GOP side who qualifies as a “fresh face” capable of running a “great campaign” at this stage in the game?
Marco Rubio and Rand Paul are both capable of it. Both could also fall flat on their faces. Huckabee also has that much likeability, potentially.
LOL. Not a chance (IMO). They’ll have serious trouble getting to 50.
That assumes that they’ll ever get to the point where enough voters have an opinion of them. They all CAN win the nomination, but chances are only one of them will last long enough to become a nationally known figure.
I will agree that neither Jeb nor Scott Walker will ever get to 60. Walker is just unlikeable and Jeb is held back by his name.
Ah, shit, I’m in the Hillary thread. Sorry about that.
Huckabee is not a “fresh face” and has not demonstrated the ability to campaign well; lately he’s been pushing the “liberals all live in a bubble and aren’t the REAL America” which is more geared toward selling his book than getting votes. He’s just playing along to remain relevant and pump up his TV pundit cred.
And both Paul and Rubio will have to dramatically step up their game if they want those kind of numbers, and both have already had some significant flubs. There’s time for them to bring it back but they’d have to change dramatically from what they’ve been doing so far.
Remember that McCain pre-Palin still commanded a certain amount of respect from the undecideds in the middle who remembered his earlier campaign. But then he threw his lot in with the far-right and acquired a millstone of a Veep, and they all fled again. To get the 60s - to pick up support in the middle ground - the candidate has to at least appear to be moderate and the environment now in the GOP is far more anti-moderate than it was in 2008. Until the GOP free themselves from the far-right/Tea Party wing, they’re seriously unlikely to see those numbers again.
HIllary, however, IS well-placed to grab the middle. She’ll probably piss off the leftward contigent but they’ll likely hold their noses and vote for her anyway to avoid a GOP victory.
There are people who made up their minds about Hillary Clinton a couple of decades ago and they’ll eat this up. But it’s not something that’s going to convince anyone new.
Doesn’t have to. At 48%, she’s not where she needs to be. Are there enough undecideds to get her to the majority she needs?
But Clinton’s a known and defined quantity. It’s not like people are going to decide in the next year that they don’t like her. The 45% that don’t like her now is pretty much all the people who will ever not like her.
And the same goes for the 46-48% who do like her. Her success or failure will depend on the very few still on the fence. Few, but enough to tip an election.
So let’s consider the points raised by Nate Silver.
Of those potentially in the running with reasonable name recognition Clinton’s favorability rating is significantly the … if you don’t want to call it “best” then at least the “least poor” - she is a net positive compared to Bush’s net negative of 14 points. As many feel unfavorably to him as to Clinton but many fewer positive.
Now of those who are not well known … be real. These are not candidates who any point left of moderately far right will find “favorable” and some will appeal to only one and not another subset of that moderately far right grouping (the difference between a Paul and a Cruz and a Carson).
Yup there is about 9% of the population that will decide the election’s popular vote. 4 out of 9 plus one decide that Hillary is the less poor choice compared to the GOP standard bearer she wins the popular vote (and likely the election); if 5 out of 9 of them (plus one) prefer the GOP standard bear is the less poor choice then she loses the popular vote.
A solid GOP candidate could whoop a Hillary Clinton and win 6 of those 9 undecideds. Assuming (s)he was not too damaged by a primary process that forced them to pander to the farther Right so much as to raise their unfavorability with the center. None of the current crop could do it even if they did not have to deal with that obstacle. With it they are dead men walking.
Their only hope is that the HRC campaign somehow implodes upon her. And that could happen. But not too likely.
Look at this another way … Silver characterizes Clintons net favorability as “almost as if voters are dispensing with all the formalities and evaluating her as they might when she’s on the ballot next November.” Against a generic Republican candidate. And against that generic republican candidate she ekes out ahead.
Please remember that the wartless generic candidate always does better than any real candidate who has features to dislike.
To me, assuming no fatal errors by Team Clinton, the main thing to watch this cycle will be the machinations of the media to try to keep it a horse race.
Which they are doing with daily negative stories about her.
I lot of people don’t like Hillary but will still vote for her. Like many Dopers who have chimed in.
Yes, this is the danger of only looking at one candidate’s numbers in isolation. It’s the “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you” thing again - Clinton doesn’t have to be beloved by all as long as she’s hated less by most.
What happens to Hillary after the first town hall meeting when someone in the audience stands up and says,
“What would you have done different in the last six and half years if you had of won the POTUS instead of President Obama”?
Will the GOP be able to follow up effectively on her answer?
I can’t wait to hear her answer … I hope it’s not like Putin’s town hall meetings lol
If it’s like 99.95% of such events and debates, she (or any candidate) would say “That’s an important question and before I answer it, I’d like to go back to this other question and run out the clock giving my talking points rather than actually answering anything YOU want answered…”
By the way, anyone thinking the “Clinton will be Obama’s third term” thing is just right-wing noise - nope. The numbers have spoken.
Which IMO suggests that she’d be better off getting out in front of it and endorsing the successes of the Obama administration rather than running away from them as the midtermers did last year (and as Gore did to Clinton’s successes in 2000). If she tries to put too much space between herself and Obama she’ll end up running a defensive campaign, allowing her opponent to tie her in knots just by saying she’s like Obama. As indeed happened to Gore.
A more offense-based approach where she points out all the things the current administration has accomplished - with Obamacare front and center - will probably serve her better; the people who hate Obama already hate her and won’t change, and everyone else will be reminded that the Democrats achieved some good stuff in the face of unprecedented opposition. It’s a ballsy strategy but she’s pretty ballsy.
If you do not think that there is a whole team preparing the answer for that and many other predictable questions and prepping her mightily you are not thinking too hard.
It is a major marketing question: how much do you distance yourself from the current administration and how much do you attach yourself to it? Gore had gone the distancing himself route and it did not play out too well.
Options:
Refuse to second guess with 20/20 hindsight as unhelpful and answer with forward looking responses. Confirm that there were indeed vigorous discussions of her expressing her views while she served and that her perspective did not always carry the day. Reference only those that are already public record however. Again refocus on the future.
Honest critiques and compliments drawing compare and contrasts.
Answer only in the broadest vaguest terms.
Actually it is pretty easy to find things already in the public record that will make a large part of her answer since she wrote about them in a book.
She won’t be JUST like Obama, obviously. She’ll be more hawkish, more friendly to Wall Street, and in general I just have more confidence in her leadership abilities.