Letters to the Editor
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Quite frankly
the Republicans HOPE Hillary wins the nomination! They KNOW they can win against her. Edwards also has baggage. Now Obama is ANOTHER story. As far as I've been able to ascertain, he has no baggage. He could possibly win against a Republican.
But frankly IMHO, Hillary couldn't win against ANY of them!
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@ sorenreport
You misunderstand. You are comparing polling of the general electorate with polling of Democratic primary voters.
The first matches up each Democratic candidate with each Republican candidate, in hypothetical national races. Edwards is ahead in all of those and beats every Republican (the first to do so).
Edwards is behind in primary polls, which you cite.
So Edwards, at this point, is best positioned to beat the GOP choice, whoever that might be. Though primary polling suggests he won't get that chance.
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@johncp
First of all, you can't equate support for Hillary at her own campaign events for the primaries to the kind of support she'd receive across the country, so just because you know Democrats who are excited about her now doesn't mean she'll get votes in a general election. That's like the teary college student in Manhattan who was so distraught when George McGovern lost: "But everyone I knew was voting for him!" Like that student, you need to get out a little more often.
And second, I agree that (most of) those charges against Hillary you cite are untrue, unfair, or mentally unbalanced. Hell, I've voted for her twice for Senate!. But that's my point: you're saying what you think SHOULD be the case, whereas I'm just talking about electability, and those are the impressions of her, especially in the South and West, true or not.
I haven't seen much evidence that people change their minds much during an election season. Definitely after it (which is why GWB gets so little support now from even people who voted for him), but election seasons only seem to serve to cement people's core feelings about the candidates, and the "undecideds" are just digging to uncover their core feelings, not to evaluate truly the relative merits of the candidates themselves.
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Deep breath, people
I understand that it's exciting to raise the heat at this point in a campaign -- especially if you're a journalist. I am an undecided voter -- and being in Washington state -- probably won't GET to decide the Democratic candidate. But having said that, the Clinton campaign has every right to tout these poll results as they do -- not because the poll is infallible -- none are -- but because it's a legitimate piece of data for Democrats to consider.
Listen, she's running for a nomination now and so it does, in fact, matter what other Democrats think, feel, believe and will do. We don't agree with 90% of Republicans on 90% of topics so why should we care about what they believe about hypothetical nominees in an election a year away?
Give Democratic voters some credit -- regardless of whom they support, they've watched this cycle play out repeatedly where the supposed manly Republican is always going to whup the girly Democrats in the conventional wisdom of future elections. But we have also witnessed that the Clintons -- and especially Hillary Clinton -- have managed to outmaneuver their Republican foes time and time again. Most importantly, we've watched Hillary Clinton take opposition to her and turn it into lemonade.
Most voters are not as partisan as most folks who post here. Most are not ideological or pure in their supposed ideals for candidates. But while most Republicans haven't figured out how truly scary Giuliani is, how slippery and empty Romney is and how retrograde Huckabee is on his thinking of church and state, I don't think it's a stretch to give Democrats some credit for thinking that many will figure it out before too long -- and having a tough, battle-proven candidate will be the one to bring it out.
I, for one, am thrilled with the line-up of Democrats. There's not one that I agree with 100% but there's not one that I think, at this point, wouldn't be a huge improvement over anyone on the other side.
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The Republicans have banked their whole campaign on Clinton getting the nomination
They've already started the attacks on her, and they've obviously been working. Of course, she makes it very easy on them and her voting record does not stand under scrutiny. Turn on your local AM talk radio station. Whose name is on their lips right now? Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.
Imagine the wrench we'd throw into their whole system if we nominated somebody else. We'd leave them scrambling to find a completely different unified strategy. In the meantime, their lapdogs, without their directives and talking points from the RNC, would wildly be yapping in a million different directions at once. It would be chaos and they would look like bigger fools than they already do.
Come on, Dems! Anybody but Hillary. Please.
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@sorenreport
You are correct, sorenreport, the pole is probably not accurate. NO POLL is accurate, because they are all statistical. You cannot go just by the margin of error stated by the pollster, because that number is itself statistical and means a margin of error of +/- x% "to a confidence factor of y." The last part is not usually mentioned, and you don't generally know what it is, but it is usually 90%, 95% or (rarely in media polls I suspect) 99%. If you have a margin or error of +/- 3% at 90% confidence, the margin of error will be higher at a confidence level of 95%.
Applying that to the CNN poll, you are probably seeing a poll that just happened to call more Edwards supporters than usual. That is just a random event. (Ten coin tosses will usually come up close to 5 heads and 5 tails, but you will sometimes get 8 heads and only 2 tails just by chance.) Given that Clinton and Obama are almost identical in their spreads (Obam beats Clinton by 1% in one race), and Edwards does better than either in all races, you then have to look at other polls to see if there is further support for that trend. If there is not, then you probably have an outlier and nothing more.
Note however that a statistical outlier for Edwards will also adversely effect Clinton and Obama in that poll, but not necessarily equally. There could be a correlation among Edwards supporters about how they feel about Clinton, Obama, or both. So when you have more Edwards supporters being polled than would normally be expected, you can no longer use the poll to predict how Obama and Clinton fair againts each other.