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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/upshot/why-hillary-clinton-is-like-john-mccain.html?ref=todayspaper


Hillary Clinton’s artificially inflated poll numbers have made her seem like an especially strong presidential candidate, but the Clinton bubble is quickly coming to an end.

Earlier in June, Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted that she has been “leading every potential Republican candidate by around 10 points” and “running far ahead of President Obama’s job approval numbers.” Carl Cannon, the Real Clear Politics Washington bureau chief, cited her standing as the most admired woman in America, a contest in which she easily topped Oprah in 2013.

But Ms. Clinton’s re-entry on the political stage over the last few weeks is turning her back into what she was before her stint as Secretary of State: an intensely polarizing political figure. Politico’s most recent poll, conducted in June amid the initial publicity for her book “Hard Choices,” found that her favorability ratings have already dropped by 20 points since 2012 among Republicans.

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that her ratings, which were 48 percent positive and 32 percent negative in April, are now down to 44 percent positive, 37 percent negative. A similar decline was apparent inpolling from Fox, which pegged her favorable/unfavorables at 51 percent/47 percent last week compared with 54 percent/43 percent in early June.

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CreditImage by Gavin Potenza
These findings confirm the pattern in her long-term poll numbers revealed by Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, who published the results on Twitter. Since becoming first lady in 1993 after the election of President Bill Clinton, the accompanying graph shows, Ms. Clinton has been especially popular twice: When she was seen as a victim during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (1998-1999) and during Mr. Obama’s first term when she served as Secretary of State (2009-2012).

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A Hillary Clinton poster draped over a fence outside a Barnes & Noble bookstore at Union Square in New York ahead of her book signing there. CreditImage by Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times
As Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine and Alex Seitz-Wald at National Journal have pointed out, Ms. Clinton was due for a fall — her previously impressive poll numbers were an artifact of serving as Secretary of State, which kept her largely out of domestic politics. During her tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat, Republicans for the most part refrained from criticizing her (at least before the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya).

As a result, the flow of negative information about her to the public largely stopped. In those circumstances, politicians’ images almost invariably improve. (Remember President Bush after the 9/11 attacks?) Now that Republicans are on the offensive, people are being reminded of what they didn’t like about Ms. Clinton, moving her poll numbers back toward their previous levels.

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Hillary Clinton’s Public Image Over the Long Term
The putative 2016 presidential candidate was most favorably viewed by the public during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and while serving as Secretary of State.

60
40
20
0
Favorable
Unfavorable
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
Lewinsky
Sec. of State

Source: New York Times/CBS News poll 1993–2008, Pollster.com Hillary Clinton favorable rating data 2009–2014.
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RECENT COMMENTS

JR 18 hours ago
Hopefully she doesn't take up space in the next election. I like her and voted for her in '08, but she is unelectable. She just doesn't have...
Soto 18 hours ago
Who cares? But then on the other hand, I think Hillary would do a better job than Obama of working around the obstructionist Republicans....
Charlotte Ritchie 18 hours ago
I find any comparison to the eternally embittered John McCain to be a stretch, but I agree with other posters that Hillary is a poor choice...
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The most relevant comparison for Hillary Clinton might be Senator John McCain. In the post-2004 period, Mr. McCain seemed like a formidable general election candidate who could help Republicans hold on to the White House despite President Bush’s declining approval ratings. Writing for Slate in 2005, Mickey Kaus joked half-seriously that “in a general election, it seems like Mr. McCain would come close to being elected by acclamation!”

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Ron Fournier of The Associated Press also emphasized Mr. McCain’s widespread support among Democrats and independents. Those numbers, however, reflected the fact that Democrats so frequently praised Mr. McCain and used him as a foil for the rest of the G.O.P. — a pattern thatdates to his underdog 2000 Republican presidential primary campaign against George W. Bush.

Predictably, once Mr. McCain ran for president again in 2008 and Democrats started sending negative messages about him, the public quickly came to see him as a conventional partisan. By late October 2008, a CBS/New York Times poll found that only 11 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of independents had a favorable view of him. Ms. Clinton’s image is undergoing a similar transformation.

As both cases illustrate, we tend to overrate the importance of candidate image, which is largely a function of the flow of partisan messages. When opposition elites withhold criticism during, say, a presidential honeymoon or a foreign policy crisis, politicians can seem unstoppable, but when normal politics resume, their images — and their poll numbers — quickly return to earth. The same will be true for Ms. Clinton.

Brendan Nyhan is an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. Follow him on Twitter at @BrendanNyhan.

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Joshua Alcorn
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