We’re two weeks from the first Democratic debate and to be honest with you, I can’t tell right now if we are underestimating Hillary Clinton’s weakness, or her strength.
It isn’t exactly conventional wisdom, but the conventional swerve is that Clinton is incredibly vulnerable. Because I’m a born contrarian, this automatically makes me wonder if people are now overestimating her weakness the way they overestimated her inevitability just six months ago. And then there’s Joe Trippi–one of the few campaign analysts who is always worth listening to–who makes the case that Clinton is much stronger than she looks. Here’s Trippi:
Sanders may hold the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, but those states have never decided who the Democratic nominee will be; they merely winnow the field. Two or three candidates emerge out of those two states to fight for the nomination across the country. Right now, it looks as if Clinton and Sanders will be those two candidates. If Biden enters the race, three will make it. The candidate suffering from Sanders’ strength and speculation about Biden is not Clinton, it’s Martin O’Malley, who might otherwise have captured the “not Clinton” vote…
To believe that Sanders or even Biden can defeat Clinton, you have to believe they can run as well against her (after the first two contests) as Obama did. The obstacles to pulling that off are significant.
First, 56% of Democratic voters are women, who prefer Clinton to her rivals. And unlike Obama, who held Clinton to just 20% of the nonwhite vote through much of 2008, Sanders is trailing Clinton by 40 to 60 points among nonwhite Democrats. Pundits seem to enjoy questioning Clinton’s ability to energize the Obama coalition, but Sanders hasn’t been able to get out of the teens in terms of support among blacks or Latinos. Biden fares better, but he’s not Obama either.
Clinton leads Biden by 27 points and Sanders by 34 points in South Carolina, where Obama defeated her by 28 points. She leads them both by 32 points in Florida, where she defeated Obama despite exit polls showing he had won 75% of the black vote. (Sanders or Biden will be lucky to get 50% of the black vote against Clinton.)
Trippi’s argument fits with my long-standing view that the Democratic race was always likely to tighten-and that Clinton has real vulnerabilities as a candidate-but that it would take a special opponent—Elizabeth Warren or Deval Patrick, perhaps—to have a better-than-even-money chance of wresting the nomination from her.
Which is why the real threat Bernie Sanders has always posed to Clinton isn’t that he’d win the nomination, but that he’d expose her enough to lure one of the big dogs into the ring.
So maybe Clinton is actually in a more dominant position right now than you think.
On the other hand what if Clinton is even weaker than she appears? For instance, try this on for size:
Right now, Clinton leads Sanders 41 to 28 in the RealClearPolitics uber-poll of polls. (Joe Biden sits at 20 percent.) Pretty formidable, right? Except, on September 30, 2007, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama 40 to 23. So she’s actually in worse shape now than she was eight years ago when she lost the nomination.
Obama’s eventual victory in the primary fight was powered by African-American voters, but what gave him a foot-hold with liberal white Democrats was his stance on Iraq, where he had had the luxury of having been “against” the war back when he had no real political responsibilities.
Well, on October 13, Hillary Clinton is going to be on a debate stage with Bernie Sanders and (presumably) Lincoln Chafee. Sanders voted against the Iraq resolution while he was an independent congressman from Vermont. Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against it. Imagine, just for a minute, what it will be like if Chafee says, “Madame secretary, I bucked my own president and my own party to vote against Iraq when you wouldn’t. Shame on you. Why should anyone think you can be trusted?”
Think that would leave a mark? I do.
As far as the debate goes, it might actually help Clinton to have Biden onstage. He’d provide another focal point and it would blunt any lines of attack on Iraq, since Biden voted with Clinton. (And by the transitive property of immunity, if Obama okayed Biden to be VP even with his Iraq vote, then Clinton can sneak under this halo, too.)
If Biden jumps into the race—at this point, I’ll be mildly surprised if he doesn’t—then the entire first debate will be about him. It would be a high-risk, high-reward move, getting in just days before the first debate. But it would signal a whole new world of trouble for Clinton, because she would have to constantly worry about the possibility of President Obama hugging—or even endorsing—Biden.
Clinton Inc. probably thinks they can gut out a heads-up race against Biden, minus Obama. But if the president were to signal to black voters that he prefers Good Old Joe? That’s a much dicier proposition.
It may be that Clinton is both stronger in some ways, and weaker in others, than is generally acknowledged. In the current scenario, her strengths are probably being underestimated. In a future scenario where a Democratic heavy decides to challenge her, her weaknesses are probably being underestimated.
The good news for Clinton is that the calendar is very much her ally. And in a few more weeks, the event horizons on those other scenarios will disappear and her window of vulnerability will begin to close.
