Almalieque wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
Which is kinda identical to Dem campaign leadership being asked who they'd rather face, to which they'll all answer "Trump", while still bashing the heck out of him.
Actually, that isn't true at all. Clinton has been on a roll of comparing ALL of the candidates to Trump, saying that they are no different. There's a reason why she is doing that, because she does not believe Trump will be the nominee.
I'm talking about the folks who run campaigns, not the candidates themselves. If you're a professional campaign manager working for Clinton (or any Dem for that matter), you're basically hoping and praying for a Trump nomination right now. He immediately turns a general election that Democrats are kinda dreading into one in which they can use Trumps over the top personality to rally people to support the party. People tend to either love or hate someone like Trump. And that plays very very well for the Dems. Polarization tends to help the Democrats. Their worst nightmare is a moderate seeming GOP candidate. In a normal election cycle, they have to go out of their way to find ways to portray the GOP candidate as some kind of dogmatic monster who will eat your babies or something. Trump kinda makes this easy for them. Really easy.
Gbaji wrote:
You do realize that Sanders voters are Warren voters? If anyone were to get hit in the polls, it would be Sanders.
Warren is seen as much more mainstream than Sanders. That was kind of my point. If Clinton were a strong candidate, then what you say would be the case. But Clinton is struggling so badly, that even Sanders (who should never be more than a low single digit candidate) is getting 30% support. Clinton's current numbers represent the party faithful who are aware that Sanders has no chance, so they're sticking with the only candidate with a chance. Warren gets in and a ton of those folks will flock to her. Sanders would lose a lot as well (as he should), but my point was semi-humor that Clinton would drop below Sanders if Warren got in, not because Sanders would remain strong, but because Clinton would more or less disappear from the polls.
Maybe it's my own Conservative blinders, but I do think that if any reasonable alternative candidate got into the race, Clinton would be out in a hot second. It's not something you'll hear liberal pundits say outright, but just the way they talk about Clinton is "off". You know when you're watching DDD on food network and you can tell that Guy is trying to find good things to say about some food item at a crappy restaurant somewhere? That's the same kind of sense I get from liberals right now when they talk about Clinton. They don't want to outright say anything negative in case that hurts her election chances later, but boy would they rather anyone else was the front runner.
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Furthermore, there was a recent poll (which again I don't like polls) that says if it were evident that HRC would do poorly in the primary, who would you vote for and she still pulled 23% of the votes, 3% under VP Biden with another 23% said that they wouldn't vote at all.
When as many people poll that they wouldn't vote at all as would vote for her, that's a problem.
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This is nothing more than GOP scare tactics to make her appear weaker than what she really is. Her approval rating within the party is 80%.
Huh? Source for this? How are you defining "within the party", because she absolutely does not have those kinds of numbers among "likely primary voters", and does even worse among the general voting public. To be fair, this early on, nearly everyone has higher unfavorable versus favorable numbers (at this stage, people tend to define themselves by who they oppose, which is a larger number). The big problem for her is that she has a very low number of "undecided" in there. Meaning that everyone else has a lot more people they can move into the favorable category as the process evolves. Most people have already decided whether they like or dislike her and those people are unlikely to change their minds.
Also, as I alluded to above, when there are a large number of candidates in the race, the unfavorable number tends to be higher, because if I've picked one out of 10 candidates, I'm going to poll "against" the other 9. This drives up the unfavorable number, but you expect it to shrink as the candidate field shrinks, and people are now polling out of say 3 candidates in a primary race (this factor also skews the early head to head general election polling). But that factor can't explain her high unfavorable rating. She's just that unpopular. Period. Even when she's the only candidate in the primary, she's not liked. And that's a really bad sign.
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Once you're down to the general election, personalities are placed second and the focus is on substance. A liberal is not going to vote for JEB because of her email controversy. Likewise, a conservative is not going to vote for HRC because he has "low energy".
Sure. But as your own numbers above show, lots of people just wont bother to show up and vote. Also, while we tend to focus on the sides of politics there are a lot of voters in the middle that don't have a strong party preference. Those are the people who make the difference in a general election.
Which, to get back to my starting point, is why every single Dem strategist and campaign manager is praying that Trump retains the GOP lead and becomes the nominee. It's by far their best chance for victory right now.