Hillary Clinton looks desperate. Marc Ambinder writes that she is planning attack ads on Obama and plans to run on claims of being more electable. He writes, “The Clinton campaign wants to spread the idea that Obama would be crushed in a general election by a Republican nominee who is more experienced and more glib than he is.” The argument that Obama can’t compete politically against Republicans immediately falls apart when we look at how Obama had done against another “experienced” politician–Hillary Clinton. Last month Clinton led Obama by ten points in New Hampshire, but today Rasmussen has Obama leading by three points. Iowa remains a dead heat in most polls, with Obama also leading in some. It is hard for Clinton to argue that Obama isn’t experienced enough to run a campaign when he has made these advances.
This whole stress on electability is based upon the myth that John Kerry won in Iowa in 2004 based on electability, with supporters of other candidates (primarily supporters of a former governor from Vermont) using this myth to claim that most people still liked their guy better, regardless of who won. The reality is that when voters took a close look at Kerry and Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire they liked Kerry better. Kerry also had a much better ground game.
Early polls in Iowa and New Hampshire are misleading because voters do not make up their minds until the last minute. In 2003 many people told pollsters they supported Dean because the media made opposition to the war virtually synonymous with supporting Dean. Once voters took a close look at the candidates, including a comparison of their positions on Iraq which were actually quite similar despite the manner in which Kerry’s position was twisted in, more chose Kerry.
This year the media proclaimed Clinton the early winner and she was the easiest name for Democrats to tell pollsters when they hadn’t made a decision. Now that people are taking a close look at the candidates, many voters aren’t falling into line. Hillary Clinton even be a victim of this early belief that her nomination was inevitable as she saw no reason to really sell herself. She played it safe, but gave voters no reason to support her beyond inevitability and now electability. The problem here is that once she looks beatable she no longer looks either inevitable or the most electable, leaving Democrats little reason to vote for her. Clinton’s argument on electabililty, or that Obama is too far left, also falls apart when we look at Obama’s greater support among independents.
One lesson from the polls, which now show a dead heat among the Democrats and Huckabee leading the Republicans in Iowa, is that looking at polls weeks or months before the Iowa caucus is meaningless. Even now it is far from certain that they reflect how the final vote will be. Far too much attention is also being paid to the national polls. For example, yesterday there was a lot of noise over a CNN/Opinion Research poll which showed that Huckabee would lose to all the Democratic candidates by double digits. Perhaps that is true, but considering how recently Huckabee became a factor it is far too early to expect national polls to accurately predict his potential. The Corner looked at the poll and questions why Edwards does so well in potential general match ups. Ross Douthat answered that well:
First of all, most voters’ image of Edwards was formed in the ’04 race, when he ran as a more centrist candidate than he’s become this time around; thus despite having move steadily leftward over the last three years, he’s still perceived as the least liberal of the Democratic front-runners by the general public. (Democratic primary voters, who are presumably paying closer attention, have a more accurate assessment.) Second, he’s a Southern white male, and even if the percentage of swing voters who would rule out voting for a woman or a black man is relatively small (and it might be large-ish), his race and sex alone would still presumably give him a slight boost. Third, he’s received considerably less press attention than Hillary and Obama over the last six months, and in a year when a generic Democrat would presumably trounce a generic Republican, he’s presumably still a more “generic” figure than either of his better-publicized opponents, and thus a better vessel for undecided voters to pour their anti-GOP animus into.
