“No Trust Issues”: Don’t Believe Those Who Say Hillary Clinton Can’t Win Because Voters Find Her Untrustworthy
Is it true, as some pundits claim, that Hillary Clinton is a fundamentally flawed candidate, one whose presidential aspirations are potentially doomed by her lack of likeability and, especially, high levels of voter mistrust?
Consider the following results from this nationwide survey of voters. When asked, only 41 percent of those polled find Clinton “honest and trustworthy,” while fully 54 percent do not. Among those who do not find Clinton trustworthy, fully 67 percent say they are voting for Clinton’s opponent. The results seem to support the contention of political pundits that a candidate who is so widely mistrusted is unlikely to win the presidency. As one analyst puts it, “If you don’t fundamentally trust someone or believe they are, at root, honest then how would you justify putting the controls of the country in their hands for at least four years?”
How indeed? Except that this data comes from 1996 presidential election exit poll – the one taken on the day of the election. That was the election, you will recall, in which the deeply mistrusted candidate Bill Clinton handily defeated his opponent and man of sterling character, World War II veteran Bob Dole, 49.2 percent to 40.7 percent. Nor are the 1996 results a fluke.
As I have discussed previously, studies by political scientists have revealed weak correlation between candidate traits and presidential election outcomes. For example, Morris Fiorina, Sam Abrams and Jeremy Pope compared the public’s evaluation of presidential candidates’ personal qualities (separate from policy stances or experience) based on American National Election Studies surveys with election results in the period 1952-2000. Their conclusion? As Fiorina summarized in this op ed piece: “Over all, in the 13 elections between 1952 and 2000, Republican candidates won four of the six in which they had higher personal ratings than the Democrats, while Democratic candidates lost four of the seven elections in which they had higher ratings than the Republicans. Not much evidence of a big likability effect here.”
This is not to say that a candidate’s personal qualities have no bearing on the vote. All things being equal, it is probably better to be trusted than mistrusted. And candidate character traits may matter more to some voters, such as independents, than to strong partisans. But when it comes to presidential elections, all things are decidedly not equal.
Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996 because, according to the exit polls, 58 percent of poll respondents cited issues as more important than a candidates’ character when it came to deciding their vote, and among this group Clinton beat Dole overwhelmingly, 69 percent to 20 percent. More generally, when presidential scholars put together their forecasts of the presidential popular vote, they focus exclusively on fundamental factors such as the state of the economy, whether the country is at war, and how long the incumbent party has controlled the White House. Question of candidate character, whether trustworthiness or likeability or any other personal attribute, do not figure into their models. The reason is that we find little evidence that they are determinative. Voters may have viewed Bill Clinton as untrustworthy, but in a time of peace and economic prosperity, most chose in the end to reward the incumbent with a second term in office, his personal peccadillos notwithstanding.
Despite these findings, this won’t stop pundits from incorrectly insisting that, “Candidates matter in close campaigns. That goes double for a presidential race which tends to be more dependent on personality and likability than on any sort of policy prescriptions [italics added].” Yes, I understand that it is August – a very slow news month. The president is on vacation. Congress is out of session. The next Republican debate isn’t until Sept. 15. Pundits – already naturally predisposed to create the perception of a race where none may exist – are deeply fearful that Clinton, who is trouncing the Democratic field by most metrics, will win this nomination without a real fight. And so why not during a slow news period pounce on the latest polls (never mind that they are not very predictive this early in the contest) to find evidence that Clinton’s “lead” is less than we might think and that she is in fact a deeply flawed candidate. So flawed, in fact, that she might as well bow out now! Cue the horse race!
Alas, simply trotting out one more stale variation about the significance of the “beer test” to make the case that Clinton is potentially doomed does not make the reference any more true this election cycle. To a certain extent the same goes for the constant emphasis on Clinton’s relatively high unfavorable ratings. While there’s some evidence that the favorable/unfavorable ratio is correlated with election outcomes, it’s unclear whether these ratings help determine voters’ support for or against a candidate, or are a reflection of that support. In any case, it is far too early in the campaign to put much stock in these numbers.
The bottom line? It may be that “Hillary just isn’t a very good candidate.” But it’s more likely that some pundits just aren’t very good political analysts.
By: Matthew Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, August
“No, Hillary Clinton Is Not Spiraling Downward”: Clinton Cast As Lyndon Johnson, Email Controversy Is Parallel To The Vietnam War
There’s no question which is the more interesting and dynamic primary campaign right now, which inevitably leads reporters covering the other one to search for something new to write about. And in a race where there’s an obvious (if not quite certain) nominee, there will always come a point at which the press will decide that that candidate is spiraling downward, the cloak of inevitability is torn and tattered, the campaign is in crisis, the whispering from party loyalists is growing louder, and the scramble is on to find an alternative before the fall occurs.
This is the moment we have come to with Hillary Clinton.
First there was the fevered speculation about Vice President Biden running against her, based on second-hand reports that Biden has had conversations about the possibility of running. I’m sure that Biden thinks about being president about as often as he brushes his teeth, but that doesn’t mean there’s an actual candidacy in the offing. But it isn’t just him. ABC News reports that “a one-time high-ranking political adviser to Al Gore tells ABC News that a group of friends and former aides are having a ‘soft conversation’ about the possibility that Gore run for president in 2016.” Gore himself is not interested, but who cares? People keep asking John Kerry if he’s going to jump into the race, no matter how many times he says no. Time magazine says Democrats are headed for a repeat of the 1968 election, with Clinton cast as Lyndon Johnson and her email controversy offered as a parallel to the Vietnam War (pretty much the same magnitude, right?).
Guess what: you put two or three former staffers to just about any major politician in a room, and they’ll have a “soft conversation” about how he really ought to run for president. If there’s one thing that stories like these should never be based on, it’s the mere fact that people who used to work for a particular politician would like that politician to run. Longtime political figures like Gore and Biden trail behind them a tribe of former staffers, advisers, fundraisers and the like, all of whom have entertained fantasies about either a job in the West Wing or at least a heady proximity to the most powerful person on earth. If you called up any of them, you could extract a quote that would make it sound like maybe, just maybe their guy might get in the race.
So right now there’s virtually no evidence that the Democratic field is going to expand beyond the current five candidates. And what about the idea that Clinton is in a drastic decline? Bernie Sanders has generated plenty of interest and some support, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats are rejecting Clinton; if there’s any evidence that Sanders supporters won’t be perfectly happy to back her if and when she’s the nominee, I haven’t seen it.
If you look over the long term at Clinton’s favorability ratings, you do see a drop, but it’s not a huge one, and not the kind of precipitous decline you’d associate with a campaign in free fall. Her favorability is down substantially from when she was Secretary of State, but that’s a natural consequence of her becoming a partisan political figure again. A year ago her favorability was just under 50 percent, and now it’s around 41 or 42 — not what she’d like, surely, but hardly a crisis. As a point of comparison, at this time four years ago, Barack Obama’s job approval was in exactly the same place, 42 percent. You may recall who won the 2012 election.
As Nate Silver observes, whether or not the movement in the polls is terribly meaningful, reporters have an incentive to describe it as such, and then run with the implications:
Even if there were no Clinton scandals, however, she’d probably still be receiving fairly negative press coverage. The campaign press more or less openly confesses to a certain type of bias: rooting for the story. Inevitability makes for a really boring story, especially when it involves a figure like Clinton who has been in public life for so long.
Instead, the media wants campaigns with lots of “game changers,” unexpected plot twists and photo finishes. If the story isn’t really there, the press can cobble one together by invoking fuzzy concepts like “momentum” and “expectations,” or by cherry-picking polls and other types of evidence. The lone recent poll to show Sanders ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire made banner headlines, for example, while the many other polls that have Clinton still leading, or which show Sanders’s surge slowing down in Iowa and nationally, have mostly been ignored.
As a result, the flow of news that Americans are getting about Clinton is quite negative. Indeed, the steady decline in her favorability ratings seems consistent with the drip, drip, drip of negative coverage, as opposed to the spikes upward and downward that one might expect if any one development was all that significant to voters.
Perhaps Republicans will get their wish, and we’ll learn that Clinton sent an email ordering the attack on Benghazi to cover up the fact that she’s the leader of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell whose goal is to enslave all Americans into a satanic Alinskyite death cult. If that happens, I’m sure some other Democrats will declare their candidacies. The other possibility is that the race will have some ups and downs, Bernie Sanders may even win a primary or two, and in the end Clinton will prevail.
That’s not as dramatic a story as a reporter covering the campaign might like. But at this point it’s still the most likely outcome.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 17, 2015
“The Junk Politics Of 2015”: You’re Getting A Sugar High, It Feels Good, It Won’t Last, And Ultimately, It’ll Make You Sick
When you eat a bowl of Simply Granola in the morning, you may think you’re making a healthy start to the day, courtesy of Quaker Oats. But you’re taking in the amount of sugar in almost four Oreo cookies.
When you listen to the politicians who want to lead the United States through the treacherous early 21st century, you may think you’re doing your job as a citizen of this clamorous and vulgar democracy of ours. You’re not. You’re getting a sugar high. It feels good. It won’t last. And ultimately, it’ll make you sick.
I’ve been trying to eat healthy, metaphorically, for the month of August. But it’s been a bust. There’s just too much bad stuff to binge on. We have a pending deal with Iran that could imperil Israel, or make the Mideast safer for a decade. We have an approaching visit of a transitional pope. We have a fledgling health care plan that’s given coverage to 15 million Americans who never had any — and one party wants to take it away. And we’re muddling through the hottest year on record, so far, surpassing the last warmest one, 2014.
And yet, what are the leaders-in-waiting talking about? Roll the highlight reel of our junk politics, starting with the also-rans:
At least one Republican wants to sic the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies. So promised Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, in a remarkable statement overlooked at the kids’ table debate last week. “I guarantee you under President Jindal, January 2017, the Department of Justice and the I.R.S. and everybody else we can send from the federal government will be going into Planned Parenthood.”
Other Republicans think we should be living in a theocracy. “It’s time we recognize the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being,” said Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, testing the latest version of his church-lady demagogy. He wants to ignore the high court on both gay marriage and abortion — breaking the law while waving his Bible.
Huckabee would also use the force of government to intervene with any woman seeking an abortion, claiming a constitutional right, the 14th and 5th Amendments, to protect a zygote. When he mentioned this Brave New World idea in the debate, no one challenged him. Instead, other candidates were equally extreme, refusing to make abortion exceptions even when the life of a woman is at stake. This is junk women’s health care, driven by religious fanaticism.
More empty calories: Scott Walker, the governor whose foreign policy experience is limited to breakfast at the old International House of Pancakes, threatens to start at least two wars upon taking office. He promises to use military action if necessary to coax Iran into doing what he wants it to do. He also wants to pick a fight with Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine and erecting a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Walker’s home state of Wisconsin ranks 35th in private sector job creation. But New Jersey is worse, suffering nine credit downgrades and ranking near the bottom in job growth. Even the governor of the state, Chris Christie, would not rise to Jersey’s defense after fellow candidates described Atlantic City as something akin to Baghdad on a hangover.
Those governors want to apply their ruinous models to the rest of the country. In the same vein, a failed former chief executive officer, Carly Fiorina, having fired 30,000 employees and driven her company’s stock price into the ground, feels more qualified than ever to be president. She’s never held elective office and rarely voted while living in California. A junk comeback.
Which gets us to Donald Trump, who boasts of four company bankruptcies, and paying people to come to his wedding. He is “a very smart person” and will be “phenomenal to the women” just like “the blacks.” It’s hard for women to attack him, he says, “because I’m so good-looking.”
Normal politics can’t explain Trump. For that you need Freud. Trump fits the classic definition of narcissistic personality disorder, as Marc C. Johnson, an astute observer of American politics, noted in a recent blog post. Everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is junk, but at least it fits a pattern.
Finally, to the Democrats. A 73-year-old socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is getting lots of attention because Hillary Clinton’s email story is boring, by Clinton scandal standards. When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.
Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.
How did this stunt become a thing among the national press corps? Junk media. Sadly, the sugar high goes two ways.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, August 14, 2015
“A Strangely Desultory Campaign”: The Great Lost Huckabee Constituency
Something I was vaguely aware of but hadn’t really focused on came very much to my attention yesterday while we were taping this week’s WaMo BloggingheadsTV/podcast with guest Matt Cooper of Newsweek. Matt wrote a column that actually got Trump’s personal attention (leading to a brief interview) pointing out that The Donald’s hostility to “entitlement reform” and trade agreements along with his better known rhetoric on immigration had positioned him well to appeal to a distinct segment of Republican voters: non-college educated white voters, a.k.a. the white working class:
In the 2014 midterms, 64 percent of noncollege-educated white voters favored Republicans. “You are talking about people who are deeply alienated from American life, both culturally and economically,” says Ronald Brownstein, a political analyst who has written extensively on the subject.
These new blue-collar Republicans are more skeptical of free trade than the right’s traditional base is. And that’s created a major shift in the party. A Pew Research Center study in May found that Republicans, more than Democrats, believe free trade agreements cost them jobs, which bodes well for Trump since the leading Republican candidates largely support free-trade agreements. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz voted for fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—an essential step for ratifying the agreement—although on Tuesday, Cruz said he wouldn’t back fast-track, insisting he wanted, among other things, amendments that would limit immigration in future trade deals. And Jeb Bush and Scott Walker support it. Others oppose the deal, mainly due to the secrecy involved in the negotiations. But none are as vocally opposed as Trump.
His free trade position isn’t Trump’s only appeal to Republican voters; he’s also in line with most of the GOP’s base on entitlements. A majority of voters in both parties oppose reducing programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Not surprisingly, whites who haven’t gone to college tend to be adamantly opposed to slashing the safety net.
The flip side of all the talk about Democratic prospects to regain some of the white working class vote (see our most recent roundtable on the subject here at WaMo in conjunction with The Democratic Strategist, based on Stan Greenberg’s advice in the current issue of our magazine) is that this demographic has entered the Republican coalition without necessarily internalizing the economic views of GOP elites. So much as the “Reagan Democrats” represented a potentially rebellious segment of the Democratic coalition back in the day, today’s blue-collar Republicans are vulnerable not just to a “raid” from Democrats but from heretical Republicans who defect from party orthodoxy on hot-button issues like trade and entitlements. That’s probably an important part of Trump’s otherwise mysterious constituency.
But you know who was positioning himself to occupy this same ground? Mike Huckabee, as I observed back in May.
It will be interesting to see if he seeks and gains attention for being (most likely) the only candidate in a huge presidential field to take issue with the Republican congressional leadership’s push to win approval for Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. More importantly, the heavy, heavy investment of Republican politicians in budget schemes that depend on reductions in Social Security and Medicare spending will give Huckabee constant opportunities to tout his newly stated opposition to such cuts as a betrayal of promises made to middle-class workers who’ve been contributing payroll taxes their entire lives. Beyond that, two candidates — Chris Christie and Jeb Bush — are already on record favoring reductions in retirement benefits that go beyond the highly indirect voucher schemes associated with Paul Ryan.
Since then Huck has run a strangely desultory campaign, missing a lot of opportunities for earned media and making most of his noise competing with Bobby Jindal as to who can get most hysterical about imaginary threats to Christianity. He’s also showing his old incompetence in fundraising.
So Huck has languished in the polls even as Trump surged, and the final indignity had to be Trump getting all of the attention at an event–last weekend’s Family Leadership Summit in Iowa–that definitely should have been prime Huck Country.
I guess it’s possible that if Trump fades quickly Huckabee can batten on some of his supporters, though they seem to be a more secular crew than the God, Guns, Grits and Gravy folk. But more likely Huck will burnish his reputation for being a politician with more potential than performance.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 22, 2015
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