Obama lost independents (who it turns out aren’t really “independent” for the most part) by a big margin in 2012. I don’t know if it was 2 to 1.
If Republicans and Republican leaners make up the majority of voters, that’s not good for your side.
Obviously… is this supposed to be news? I see no evidence that this is the case right now. Not everyone who opposes Hillary is a Republican, but losing independents doesn’t tell us much, especially this early. Turnout now is what’s important, not the supposed swing voters (of which there are just not that many).
Your constant wishful thinking is tiring. Yes, you want the Republicans to win, and yes, you will generally tend to interpret every fact as somehow favorable to this when possible. You must realize that none of us are going to take your analysis over Nate Silver’s, right?
Clinton’s current approval is 39%. And we still haven’t hit bottom. I’m just wondering at what point your own wishful thinking would end.
An interesting opinion piece* on some of Hillary’s problems
I don’t know the site, but David Horowitz is involved, so it’s clearly not a left-wing site**. That said, I thought the piece raised some good points (especially with regards to Obama doners who’d open their wallets for Biden but not for Hillary).
*I know it’s not news. It’s some guy’s opinion.
**ETA–Ok, I checked their front page…they’re about twice as far to the right as HuffPo is to the left. That said, I still think the specific article I linked to is worth looking at even if most of the rest of the site is frothy.
Oh God, the comments…why did I read the comments?
What wishful thinking? I’m with Nate Silver: these polls don’t tell us much that’s meaningful this early.
I’ll start to believe she’s in serious trouble when he does.
For all the right-wing talking points (and those echoing them here), this image seems to me much more accurate.
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It’s a graph showing the average of national polls of Hillary Clinton vs. the GOP field, for the 6 months from March 1st to mid-August. It’s essentially flat, with the variation of about +/- 4% – about the error rate of most polls.
(The full article (here) also contains a section on why ‘favorability ratings’ are pretty meaningless for elections.)
Boy, Clinton’s email server sure is in big trouble:
You know, seeing as how Clinton says the investigation is directed at her server, not her.
And she is likely right on that.
Yeah we talked about this post earlier. As mentioned, taking the averages of polls against ten Republicans seems pointless, does it really matter that Hillary continues to poll well against Mike Huckabee? However if you look at Rubio or Jeb her lead has indeed narrowed significantly.
His analysis of favorability is also dubious. In fact at this stage of the race it’s probably a better indicator that head-to-head because the Republican contenders are largely unknown to the public. Once they select their candidate and he becomes widely known, then it becomes the best indicator.
Hillary had a favorability of +25 when she was SOS and everyone agrees that that was going to fall. But what is a reasonable baseline to judge her current number? One natural baseline for any politician anytime is 0. Another would be Obama’s number since he is the face of the Democratic party. Another could be Obama’s number at a similar stage in 2012. All three indicators point to a similar baseline number of 0-2 which is where Hillary seemed to have stabilized in early 2015. Not a great number but a reasonable basis for a successful presidential campaign.
However since then it has dropped rapidly to -9 which is most certainly not a healthy position. I don’t know the last politician who has won a presidential election with a favorability of -9 at this stage and I suspect it has never happened. And there are a bunch of other numbers to suggest Hillary is not in good shape. She has terrible numbers on honesty and poor numbers on “cares about the needs”. Her swing state numbers are also poor to terrible. She still does OK on national head-to-heads but even there Biden does better. Overall she is definitely struggling.
Yeah, jayjay. Why are you so wound up? 
Well how else would you know Obama is secretly pushing for Susan Rice or Collin Powell? I think it’s neato that some administration insider is willing to spill the secrets. Normally I wouldn’t read the comments but this time its very good to do so because it lines up with what I think.
You enjoy having your brain slightly melted?
Yes, the Intelligence AG’s memo had referred the concern that information that he feels should have been classified was not classified at the time (and thus made into non-secure systems including Clinton’s) to the FBI. I would certainly hope that they would take such a referral extremely seriously.
According to this AP article, an initial look at the latest email dump indicates that there were indeed efforts to avoid sending classified information via email.
My favorite part is an example of the kind of thing that can be very frustrating when dealing with classified information (or information that might be “adjacent” to classified info):
I’ve come across similarly nothing-statements that happened to be stamped “Confidential” or “Secret” (probably due to laziness – some official doesn’t feel like going through every page in a document so they stamp every page with the same classification as the most sensitive part) in my time in the Navy and working as a civilian for the Navy.
This takes me back to my argument about accountability. This is something that everyone has known is a problem, yet Presidents and their close appointees(Secretaries of State) act as if they are powerless to do anything about it.
Um, this government is ruled by the people through their elected representatives, NOT by the unelected bureaucracy. That right there is why Donald Trump is doing so well.
It’s a problem of every large organization. The government isn’t just big, it’s millions of people. In the short term, which is the only term presidents get, there’s not much change that can be made. Better would be laws that track accountability of public workers, with penalties and rewards for bad and good behavior.
Presidents focus on stuff all the time and not just big stuff. So do Secretaries of State. It would seem that this would be something important to work on. Clinton’s Reinventing Government initiative fixed a lot of small problems within the government but for whatever reason classification rules got overlooked.
But now that those rules seem ready to derail a Presidential campaign, maybe now they’ll be considered important enough to address.
You have a seriously idiosyncratic definition of “derail”.