Hillary Clinton has been the subject of more than a few soft news features aimed at showing she’s a real person with a nuturing side to her that isn’t seen during the campaign. But so far, they haven’t helped much.
On Wednesday, the women’s magazine Vogue became the latest publication to showcase Clinton’s softer side, as it published a lengthy profile by Jonathan Van Meter that asked whether Clinton will “make history” this election.
“[Clinton] spent the next hour moving through the applause lines of her stump speech, and then listening intently to voters’ questions and answering them with candor,” Van Meter wrote, describing Clinton during a campaign rally in January. “She was connecting. You could feel it.”
During an interview, Van Meter asked Clinton why there’s “still such a hurdle for women in our country” to be taken seriously as presidential candidates.
“People are very convinced they want to vote for the right person,” Clinton replied. “And then … you know, you get little hints that maybe they’re not as comfortable with a woman being in an executive position. Especially in a big, rough-and-tumble setting like New York City or the United States of America. But I think it’s changing.”
Another moment in the article describes how he watched Clinton enter a room in which she’s the only woman. “Her body language seems to be saying: I am, at the very least, your equal; I am also probably the most powerful person here.”
Campaigns often agree to give access to reporters for these types of profiles with the expectation that they will be less critical than a hard news story and will then, hopefully, pay off with an increase in support among some voter demographic.
But on Wednesday, a new poll by Quinnipiac Universiy showed that Clinton’s support among women was narrowing with her rival Bernie Sanders, despite prior soft features meant to help her campaign. The poll showed that among registered Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, Clinton got 47 percent and Sanders got 41.
Those numbers were released even after BuzzFeed, a news site popular among young adults, published its own long profile in January about how Clinton “wants to talk to you about love and kindness,” wrote the author, Ruby Cramer.
“What she wants to talk about hinges on a simple question of how we can, as humans, better treat one another,” Cramer wrote. “To Hillary Clinton, this is politics. She’s talking, literally, about ‘going back and actually living by the Golden Rule.’ She’s talking about a ‘great renaissance of caring in this country.'”
Six days before the piece published, Monmouth University released a poll of registered Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters that said Clinton’s support among women was 54 percent to Sanders’ 35 percent. That was a drop from the month before, when her support among that group was 10 points bigger and she led Sanders 64-19.
On Sept. 7, The New York Times ran a story about Clinton’s campaign, with interviews from aides, that said the former secretary of state wanted to begin showing “more humor and heart.”
“They want to show her heart, like the time she comforted former drug addicts in a school meeting room in New Hampshire,” said the story from Amy Chozick. It said Clinton “will still invoke the joy brought into her life by her granddaughter, Charlotte, but, given the child’s obvious advantages and privilege, will speak more broadly about building a better future for all Americans’ children and grandchildren.”
Seven days after the story published, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that “71 percent of Democratic-leaning female voters said in July that they expected to vote for Clinton [and] only 42 percent do now, a drop of 29 percentage points in eight weeks.”
