Summer is over and with the arrival of autumn, leaves are starting to turn. Similarly, some once-promising presidential campaigns have begun to shrivel and curl up at the edges.
The fall has come already to Rick Perry and Scott Walker.
But, despite chill winds, there are candidates still clinging on who would certainly be highly unusual nominees. Donald Trump and Ben Carson are in this category and continue to enjoy great popularity.
But it is the Democrats who, even more than the GOP, seem bent on nominating someone who should be unelectable. Even now they are on track to pick Hillary Clinton. It is supposedly her turn.
The latest Quinnipiac poll hints that Clinton may have stopped bleeding support, at least for now. But as they make up their minds, early-state Democrats would do well to look deeper. Her standing with the national general electorate continues to deteriorate, and has arguably never been worse.
The same Quinnipiac poll, released Thursday, shows that Clinton is now considered to be honest and trustworthy by only 32 percent of registered voters, and dishonest and untrustworthy by 63 percent. This is a personal record for her, and it’s worse than any other candidate for whom the question was asked.
The poll also shows Clinton’s unfavorable rating at an all-time high for Quinnipiac (55 percent) and has her losing nationwide in head-to-head match ups against Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson. (She narrowly edges out Donald Trump, 45 to 43 percent.) She performs worse than Vice President Joe Biden (who is not officially a candidate yet) against all four, and no better than Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders against anyone but Carson.
Of course, the great hope of Clinton’s candidacy is that, just as President Obama drove historically high turnout and won unprecedented margins among black voters, so she can energize the female vote and do better among women than the typical Democrat would. The Quinnipiac poll suggests this just isn’t the case. Against Fiorina, Clinton does no better among women than Biden does; they both lead her by nine points. She does worse than Biden against Carson, Trump, and Bush.
In other words, if Clinton’s plan is to build an unusually big advantage among women, she will be doing it from scratch.
This is not just a consequence of her inferior political skills and unlikeability. It is also the bitter fruit of her many recent deceptions.
For now, Democrats still seem to be taking her word for it that her email scandal is no big deal. But as the polling suggests, the public as a whole seems to have a different attitude. After hiding her work correspondence from her employer for nearly six years, Clinton offered a series of implausible excuses as to why.
She claimed she had not put any classified information at risk, and this turned out to be untrue. She claimed that she had handed over her correspondence voluntarily, when in fact she was required by law to hand it over. Throughout, she has claimed to be no more than the victim of her political enemies’ malice, taking no real responsibility for her own poor choices.
This is all adding up to a very flawed nominee. The sum of it should terrify Democratic voters.
