Hillary Drops Below the Water Line

My American Thinker article of June 12, 2015 asked the question: “What if Most Democrats Don’t Want Hillary?” The question I asked and my prediction of the trend of polls that suggested that Hillary would soon be unwanted by Democrats are no longer hypothetical. Two polls in mid-August show that Hillary has dropped below fifty percent among Democrats. The most recent poll published, the CNN/ORC poll shows that today the percentage of Democrats who want her as the party nominee is 47%. As bad as that news is for her, it is the trajectory of that poll that ought to terrify Hillary’s supporters, considering the decline since April in the percentage of Democrats favoring Hillary for the nomination: April 19 (69%), May 31 (60%), June 28 (58%), July 22 (57%), and August 16 (47%). The next CNN poll can be expected to show her percentage support in the mid-40s.

A few days before that CNN/ORC poll was published, a Fox News poll showed that only 49% of Democrats now want Hillary as their nominee. As with the CNN/ORC poll, there is a similar period, although slightly less uniform, decline. Here are the Fox News poll numbers asking whom Democrats supported for the 2016 nomination, and Hillary’s numbers in those polls: March 31 (61%), April 19 (62%), May 15 (63%), June 2 (57%), June 23 (61%), July 15 (59%), August 2 (51%), and August 15 (49%). The next Fox News poll will likely show Hillary in the mid-40s as well. Virtually all the other major polls show the same decline – CBS News, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac University, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, McClatchy/Marist and Monmouth University – although none of these polls has yet showed Hillary dropping below the critical 50% mark among Democrats. The decline in those polls that have asked the question on different occasions this year, however, has been enormous. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows a drop from 75% in mid-June to 59% in mid-July, and Quinnipiac shows a drop from 60% to 55% from mid-April to mid-July. In associated questions in these polls, no one is saying that he has never heard of Hillary, nor has no opinion about her. That is the intractable problem she faces today. Hillary cannot reintroduce herself to America, because everyone already knows her so well. Democrats in the last couple of years have wistfully imagined that a fawning establishment media, glowing photos of Hillary on women’s magazines, and the popularity of her husband (or, at least, what these Democrats wish to believe about Bill’s popularity) would sail her through the general election. Now, of course, it will not even sail her through the Democrat nomination fight. Hillary has been a very unpopular political figure in America for almost a quarter of a century. The Republican landslide in 1994 was largely caused by American unhappiness with the new first lady, unelected and unaccountable to the people, exercising power she had never earned and hiding all her machinations from the people and the press. She almost singlehandedly turned the Democratic Party from the majority party in Congress and state government in America into a minority status from which it has never recovered. One might have thought that Democrats would grasp her pathetic political skills. No other politician in American life fits so closely Tallyrand’s description of the Bourbons of France: “They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.” And no public figure seems most like Marie Antoinette’s attributed response to the poor of France who had no bread: “Let them eat cake.” Very powerful and very rich, Hillary waddles around like a titled dowager entitled to privilege and high offices. Democrats are now trapped between two fatal problems. Hillary is a dreadful candidate who will lose the general election, and possibly by the sort of landslide that would give the incoming Republican president the power to implement a true revolution. But even if Democrats dump Hillary, it will be only to nominate another hapless geriatric career politician whose candidacy will splinter their party and cause millions of aging feminists to stay home in sullen protest, creating the prospect for a Republican landslide. It is an impossible problem for Democrats, but of course, it is a problem of their own creation.