Clinton’s base
by digby
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this. As I’ve written before, I think this was subliminally decided back in 2008 when the primary was pretty much a tie and the party collectively agreed that Obama would go first and Clinton would go second. Her numbers are those of an incumbent:
The key to Clinton’s early leads over the Republican field is that in addition to having the Democratic base strongly unified behind her, she’s also getting a substantial amount of support from GOP voters. Anywhere from 15 to 20% of Republicans say they’d vote for Clinton in match ups with everyone except Rand Paul right now, against whom she gets 12% of the Republican vote. She only loses 9-10% of the Democratic vote in every match up except the one against Christie, who gets 12%. There are more Democrats than Republicans in the country to begin with, and when you combine that with having a more unified party it gives Clinton her solid early leads. Whether Clinton will be able to hold on to that Republican support once the party gets behind a candidate remains to be seen but she has it for now.
Clinton also remains dominant in the Democratic primary field. 54% of the party’s voters want her to be their candidate to 16% for Joe Biden, 12% for Elizabeth Warren, 5% for Bernie Sanders, 2% for Jim Webb, and 1% for Martin O’Malley. If Biden and Warren don’t end up making the race Sanders appears to have a little bit of separation from the bottom tier that could make him Clinton’s leading rival.
Clinton has more than 50% support for the Democratic nomination with liberals, moderates, women, whites, Hispanics, African Americans, younger voters, and seniors. The only 2 demographic groups we track where she falls a little bit short of that mark are men and middle aged voters.
She falls a little bit short with men and middle aged voters? Actually, a large majority of middle aged voters support her (67%), just a slightly smaller majority than other age cohorts. But she doesn’t get even a majority of men in the Democratic Party:
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