Hillary Clinton officially secured the Democratic party’s nomination for president last week, placing her one step closer to the job she has been doggedly pursuing for almost 20 years.
With the exception of Donald Trump, no major-party nominee has ever been so unpopular with the broader public. The two are viewed unfavorably by an overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens. Clinton’s flaws are manifest, from corruption to the lying to an utter lack of charm. But she counters them with organization, money, a single-minded determination, and political instincts that are sharper than most people realize. She will be a formidable candidate in the general election.
Over the 25 years she has been a national figure, Clinton’s relationship with the public has had a byzantine trajectory. She began her career in the spotlight as a polarizing first lady. Laura Bush and Michelle Obama enjoyed favorable ratings of better than 60 percent for the entirety of their tenures, but scandals and a botched effort at health care reform soured the public on Hillary Clinton. In the summer of 1996, just as her husband was about to be reelected overwhelmingly, Gallup found her rating split, 46 percent favorable to 47 percent unfavorable.
Her numbers improved dramatically when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. The public sympathized with her plight as a mistreated spouse, and her favorable rating hit 67 percent shortly after the 1998 midterms. But this was not to last. The controversies surrounding the end of Bill Clinton’s administration, like the Marc Rich pardon, damaged her. A workmanlike tenure in the Senate enabled her to win reelection with ease but did little to improve her national numbers. By the end of 2007, public views of her remained more or less evenly split.
Her image improved dramatically when she became secretary of state. As is typical of high-ranking cabinet officials, the public liked her more than it liked the president. By the time she left Foggy Bottom, 64 percent of Americans had a favorable view of her, per Gallup.
Then the Benghazi controversy ensnared her, and her numbers plummeted, reaching a level not seen since the Whitewater scandal in the early 1990s. Usually, bad headlines harm the ratings of the president, while the public is more forgiving of his executive appointees. For instance, as late as the summer of 2006, Condoleezza Rice still had a favorable rating of 61 percent, 20 points higher than President George W. Bush. But Benghazi hurt Clinton without really affecting Obama—an exception to the rule. The damage to her reputation was compounded by the email scandal—another debacle that tarnished her without really harming Obama.
On the eve of the 2016 Democratic convention, her favorable rating stood at a paltry 37 percent in the Gallup poll. This is an extraordinary turnaround: Nearly one in three Americans have shifted from a positive to a negative view of her in the last four years.
If public views of Clinton have varied dramatically over the decades, she has many qualities that remained constant. She is a crafty political operative whose pursuit of power has been relentless. Who else but Clinton could have parlayed the Lewinsky scandal into a seat in the United States Senate, and by extension a shot at the presidency? And while Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign was badly run in many respects, she showed determination by hanging around after Obama’s big victories on Super Tuesday that year. She won a majority of the contests from that point forward and rallied roughly half of the Democratic electorate behind her. With such a power base, she was in a prime position to raise a ruckus at the 2008 Democratic convention and become the leader of a “party in exile.” However, she cleverly cut in the opposite direction. She gave a rousing endorsement of Obama, unified the party, and secured for herself the job at State, again putting her in prime position for the White House.
Clinton has another asset working in her favor: Barack Obama. No Democratic president since JFK has been as consistently popular with his own party. Gallup’s latest reading found Obama drawing 90 percent approval from self-identified Democrats. This is significant because, since 1988, the Democratic share of the national presidential or congressional vote has never fallen below 45 percent. If Obama can bring the Democrats home to Clinton, she will need only a couple more points to edge Trump in the national popular vote.
Again, it is a testament to Clinton’s political instincts that the president is so staunchly in her corner. She wisely buried the hatchet with Obama after the bruising 2008 primary and positioned herself as his heir apparent. Obama knows that his legacy depends upon her victory in November, so he will surely try to leverage his popularity among Democrats to her benefit. Who would have guessed, eight years ago, that she would be in such a strong position within her own party?
This election cycle has been so unpredictable to date that it is a fool’s errand to try to guess what comes next. Still, Clinton must not be underestimated. Though she has manifest weaknesses, she is a smart, ferocious politician. If she and Obama can unite the Democratic party behind her candidacy, she will be tough to beat in November.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
