Hillary, The Blogs & The Base

Hillary Clinton Legacy blog posts Polling & the Blogosphere The 2006 Race

January 6, 2006October 1, 2019 Mark Blumenthal16 Comments

Over the last few weeks, bloggers have debated the appeal of a potential presidential candidacy by Hillary Clinton to the "base" of the Democratic party. Today I want to point out some polling data that are relevant to that debate, not because I have strong feelings about Clinton as a candidate, but because this issue gets at a bigger question recently posed by historian and new blogger David Perlmutter: "Are bloggers ‘The People?‘" Not surprisingly — with respect to Hillary Clinton – the answers are hazy, although at least for now the opinions of activist bloggers appear to be at odds with the overwhelming majority of rank and file Democrats.

Here is a quick summary of the debate. On one side is the argument articulated by Susan Estrich in her book The Case for Hillary Clinton:

"[W]hich of your safe white men are going to excite the base the way Hillary does, so they can spend all their time in the middle? I’ll answer: None."

On the other, bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Perlmutter have pointed out that many prominent liberal bloggers are very unhappy with Senator Clinton. As Kaus put it:

"Exciting the base is not something Hillary Clinton has been doing a lot of lately! I doubt that the Democrats’ ‘base’ will forgive her for her Iraq vote even if the war turns into a relative success. Suppose that happens–what’s she going to do, run on a campaign of ‘I told you so’? That’s always a turn-on for the die-hards!"

This leads to me want to rephrase Perlmutter’s question: Do blogs represent the Democratic "base?"

The answer may depend in part on how what we mean by "the base." Are we talking about voters who think of themselves as Democrats? Or are we talking about only those who vote in primaries, who consistently support Democratic candidates or feel "strongly" about their party affiliation? Or are we talking about the yet smaller populations of those who donate to campaigns or who are active as supporters in the grass- or net-roots?

Kaus, Permluter and others make a persuasive case about the reactions of prominent voices of the liberal "net roots." I have not read Estrich’s book, but I get the impression from the quoted passage that she defines the base a bit more broadly – the larger pool of voters who typically support Democrats when they vote. But I should let Estrich and the others debating these issues speak for themselves. For now I just want to point to some available data on the roughly 30-35% of registered voters who think of themselves as Democrats.

The poll results we typically watch most closely are those that measure vote preference – for whom would you vote if the election where held today? Unfortunately, vote preference is probably the least useful question at this stage. Most voters are unfamiliar with the various potential candidates and tend to gravitate to names they know even if their real commitment is uncertain or nonexistent. For now, of course, Clinton is much better known than potential candidates like Feingold, Warner, Bayh and others. Rather than the vote, the more useful questions are favorable ratings and specific measures of other attitudes that actually exist.

Along those lines, here are some useful findings:

First, a survey released last October by the Pew Research Center included favorable ratings of Bill and Hillary Clinton (they interviewed 2006 adults, but asked the Clinton favorable ratings of random split samples). Eighty four percent (84%) of Democrats rated Hillary Clinton favorably, 13% rated her unfavorably; 35% of Democrats gave her a "very favorable" rating. Moreover, Hillary had much higher rating among liberal Democrats (94% favorable) than among moderate and conservative Democrats (78%).

0106_pew

As the table above shows, Hillary’s ratings are only slightly lower than those of her husband and the difference is mostly due to relatively lower scores among moderate and conservative Democrats, not liberals.

Second, the Diageo-Hotline poll tracked Hillary Clinton’s favorable rating among Democrats during 2005. The results are more or less consistent with those from Pew. Taking sampling error into account, Hillary Clinton’s favorable rating among Democrats has held roughly constant since July – roughly 80% rate her favorably and roughly 40% rate her very favorably. (Note that the Democrat subgroup ranged from roughly 200-250 interviews on the Diageo/Hotline polls for a sampling error of roughly 6-7%). The slightly higher "very favorable" that Hillary gets on this poll may result from the sample frame (Hotline interviews only registered voters) or the slightly different language Hotline uses for its answer categories ("very" and "somewhat" favorable rather than Pew’s "very" and "mostly" favorable).

0106_hotline_2

[Correction: The table orignally posted omitted the November data and mislabled October as November. The one posted above is correct. Apologies for the error].

Third, a recent Gallup poll asked adults whether they consider Hillary Clinton to be a liberal, a moderate or a conservative. As reported by The Hotline earlier this week, only 33% of Democrats consider Clinton a liberal, 46% a moderate and 9% a conservative.

Note the similarity of these results to the ideological self-identification of Democrats evident on the Pew survey, where (given the subgroup sizes) roughly a third of Democrats self-identify as liberal, the rest as moderate or conservative. These results are also consistent with a question about unnamed hypothetical candidates posed to Democrats and Democratic "leaners" by the December Cook/RT Strategies poll, as detailed by Charlie Cook in a recent column (hat tip Perlmutter):

29 percent chose the "Democratic Classic" candidate, reflecting the traditional Democratic liberalism, 31 percent chose the moderately liberal candidate and 31 percent chose the full-fledged moderate.

Taken together, these data support one of two conclusions: Either most Democratic identifiers know that Hillary has taken a lot "moderate" or "conservative" positions as a US Senator and tend approve OR (more likely in MP’s opinion) most Democrats simply like Hillary, know her stands on issues only vaguely and do what voters typically do, those who like her tend to project their own ideological identity on to hers. Liberals think she is a liberal, moderates think she is moderate and so on. Either way, the overwhelming majority of those who consider themselves Democrats rate Hillary favorably, and at least a third do so with intensity and liberal Democrats appear to like her better than moderate or conservative Democrats.

Readers should consider these results with some very important caveats. First, as with any poll, they are just a snapshot in time. The primaries and caucuses are still a long way off. Second, the overwhelming majority of Democratic identifiers and especially liberal Democrats are certainly opposed to the Iraq war. On a recent CBS News poll most Democrats say they either want to decrease the number of US troops in Iraq (36%) or withdraw altogether (40%). Third, adults who self-identify as Democrats are not the same as the much smaller pool of Democratic primary voters, much less the even smaller number of activists and donors. We will need larger samples of Democratic primary voters to get a handle on those populations. Fourth and finally, these results tell us nothing about Senator Clinton’s skills as a candidate or what sort of campaign she might run, and MP is not foolish enough to make any sweeping predictions in that regard. What we can say, for now at least, is that the recent hostility of left-leaning blogs is not evident among rank and file Democrats.

But if blogs are not "the people" in this case, MP wonders if the better question is whether blogs will ultimately prove to be opinion leaders. As Perlmutter asks, will they ultimately fulfill their "potential for political power" and "influence their readers or greater public opinion?" On that question, only time will tell.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus asks for comparative data on Muskie. MP provides it here.

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.