The Harris Poll that came out today is getting a lot of attention; Harris's headline says that 50% of U.S. adults would not vote for Hillary Clinton if she ran for President.

A huge caveat, though, is in order: while the poll's sample size was quite large, over 2,000, it was an online poll in which people apparently answered demographic questions about themselves, and then responded to a series of questions about Hillary Clinton. Online polls in general are unreliable. Harris tried to correct for the main biases inherent in online polling by weighting for the obvious demographic factors (age, gender, income level, etc.) and adding "[p]ropensity score weighting ... to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online." It would be interesting to get a look at that calculation! Intuitively, I suspect that heavy internet users are more likely to be anti-Hillary than the general population, as are people who are willing to take the trouble to fill out an online survey. Further, the poll doesn't seem to have made any attempt to identify likely voters.

Subject to those major qualifications, the poll's results are bad for Mrs. Clinton, but not too different from other data I've seen. The most significant fact is that 39% of respondents say they definitely would not vote for her. It's hard to win a Presidential election when you can only compete for 60% of the votes.

Some of the other responses are also troubling, from Hillary's perspective. A surprising 45%, including 44% of independents, agree that "It’s difficult to trust her because of Whitewater and other scandals in the Clinton White House." That lingering baggage is pretty much impossible to deal with, since she can only make matters worse by talking about the old scandals. Similarly, 44% say that "Her handling of health care reform in the White House raises questions about her ability."

I've always thought that the real joker in Hillary's deck is the strangeness of putting Bill Clinton back in the White House, with an influence on policy and appointments that would be not just ambiguous, but unknowable. That view finds support in this poll too, as 50% disagree--40% strongly--with the proposition that it would be good to have Bill and Hillary both back in the White House.

One last note--older Americans really can't stand Hillary. Those 62 and over are her worst demographic, by far, another serious problem for a Democrat hoping to be President.

On the whole, despite obvious caveats about the online poll's reliability, it is a valuable reminder of why Republican prospects in 2008 are better than one might think from the current political climate.

UPDATE: On a more amusing note, this video is via Hugh Hewitt.

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Posted by John at 09:57 PM  |    |