Doomed. Absolutely doomed.
Much has been made of the release of the USA Today/Suffolk poll earlier in the week on the 2016 presidential race. Much of the focus of the coverage has been on the frontrunner position of one Donald Trump in the multi-multi-candidate Republican primary.
But Suffolk also saw fit to poll the general election, pairing Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton with most of the leading figures on the GOP side of the ledger. In those surveys, Hillary Clinton did quite well, leading the entire field by margins ranging from 4-17 points:
(Hillary Clinton vs.)
Jeb Bush — 46-42 Clinton (Clinton +4)
Marco Rubio — 46-40 Clinton (Clinton +6)
Mike Huckabee — 49-40 Clinton (Clinton +9)
Rand Paul — 48-38 Clinton (Clinton +10)
Scott Walker — 48-37 Clinton (Clinton +11)
Ben Carson — 49-36 Clinton (Clinton +13)
Donald Trump — 51-34 Clinton (Clinton +17)
So, in summary, Hillary Clinton, according to Suffolk, leads five of the seven leading GOP contenders by a larger margin than any Democrat has achieved in presidential victory since 1964.
In a follow-up piece, the head of the Suffolk polling unit, David Paleologos, concluded that this poll was very bad news. For Hillary Clinton.
Head past the jump to read the logic behind his statement, and why this should give our readers a strong sense of deja vu.
In a companion piece to the poll release on Tuesday, Paleologos was tasked with analyzing his poll for USA Today. This was the thesis of said analysis:
In January 2015, Hillary Clinton led Jeb Bush by about 10 points in the national head-to-head matchups, according to Real Clear Politics. Since that time the Clinton campaign has focused the front-runner on engaging directly with voters in key early states. This commitment has come at the expense of granting multiple national TV interviews, something other candidates have taken full advantage of. In fact, since January, Clinton's decision to grant only one national interview could be hurting her.
Tuesday's USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll shows a much closer race, with Clinton leading the former Florida governor by only 4 points, 46% to 42%. Clinton is struggling, and she is polling under 50% not only against Bush, but also against Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
There's a lot here, and a lot of it is absurd.
For one thing, Paleologos goes apples-to-oranges to make his point look more profound. He compares the RCP average in January to a single poll (his own) released this week, and makes it sound like the situation is dire for team Clinton.
But if he compared the RCP in average in January to another poll ... say ... last week's CNN poll, the conclusion would be quite different, since Clinton led Bush by 13 points in that poll.
Or, if we went for a more intellectually honest approach, and compared the RCP polling averages from January until present day, we'd find that the shift isn't quite as pronounced (Clinton leads Bush by six points as of this Suffolk release in the RCP average).
But, there is also this silliness about the "50 percent rule" he alludes to in the second paragraph of the above excerpt. Basically, Paleologos is implying that even though Clinton leads the balance of the field by at least a half-dozen points, she is in trouble, because as the better-known candidate, she should be over 50 percent of the vote.
In other words, Paleologos is anointing Clinton with a quasi-incumbent status. He must be, because the "50 percent rule" certainly does not apply typically to races in which there is no incumbent. Consider our last "open seat" presidential race, when Barack Obama defeated John McCain in 2008.
In that election, Obama was under 50 percent in over three quarters of the polling conducted in the race, and McCain was under 50 percent in virtually every poll conducted in the race. What's more, it was nearly impossible to find a poll with Obama over 50 percent until the final weeks of the election:
So, for Paleologos to find it disturbing that Clinton is not cracking the 50 percent threshold, he has to be assuming a virtual incumbency on her part. But even that, honestly, is a stretch which borders on absurdity.
Jeb Bush, who polls the strongest when paired with Clinton, is nearly universally known: Suffolk's poll shows that only four percent of the electorate has never heard of the former governor of Florida. Trump and Huckabee are similarly well-known. Yet, somehow, Paleologos seems to indicate that there is great peril in Clinton's 46-42 edge over Bush, as if Bush, despite being universally known, will hoover up two-thirds of the undecideds. Even for those who still cling to the incumbency rule, that seems dubious.
Now, there are lesser-known GOP hopefuls. Both Scott Walker and Ben Carson are mysteries to a quarter or more of the 2016 potential electorate. But Clinton is so close to 50 percent against those two that Walker or Carson would need to pick up over 85 percent of the undecided vote to win. Again, not likely to happen.
If this all seems familiar to you, it should. What makes Paleologos's Clintonian pessimism all the more silly is: he's been here before. And he was embarrassed on the national political stage as a result.
Remember this?!
“I think in places like North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, we’ve already painted those red," David Paleologos, the president of Suffolk University Political Research Center told Fox host Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday. "We’re not polling any of those states again. We're focusing on the remaining states.”
"Before the debate, the Suffolk poll had Obama ahead 46 to 43 [in Florida] in the head-to-head number,” Paleologos responded. “A poor place to be for a couple of reasons. Number one, his ballot test, his head-to-head number was below 47 percent before the debate, and it’s very, very difficult when you have the known quantity, the incumbent, to claw your way up to 50. So that was a very, very poor place for him to be."
"So we’re looking at this polling data not only in Florida but in Virginia and North Carolina and it’s overwhelming."
Yup. Same analysis ... same dude. When pressed
on the subject post-election in 2012, he acknowledged that "The incumbency rule does not hold, at least in Florida and Virginia." Apparently, he truly thought that was an isolated incident, and that the incumbency rule still holds. Even in races where there is no incumbent.
And let's be clear on that—there are other grounds to declare the incumbency rule in this race somewhat silly. There is a stronger electoral tradition/trend that should, in theory, apply in 2016. And it favors the Republicans. Only once since the end of World War II has the same party held the White House for three consecutive terms—the Reagan years between 1981-1993. So, if anything, Clinton's relatively solid leads over the entirety of what was billed as the greatest GOP field in generations is even more impressive, since there should be (and historically, has been) a pretty strong undertow for the incumbent party after eight years at the helm. Viewed through that lens, Clinton's solid leads are more impressive, and Paleologos's assertions of peril seem even more odd.
Absurdly shoddy poll analysis aside, there was one other McNugget of general electoral analysis from Paleologos that was also deeply grating and inaccurate:
Perhaps the Clinton campaign is hoping a well-funded independent candidate will emerge and guarantee a Hillary Clinton election just as independent Ross Perot did for Bill Clinton in 1992. That year Clinton easily defeated incumbent George H.W. Bush with only 43% of the popular vote to Bush's 38%, while Perot received 19%. The result was that Clinton won states like Montana, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, which usually trend Republican.
Christ. Damned if Paleologos hasn't resurrected the greatest right-wing zombie electoral myth of them all—the "Perot killed Bush 41's presidency" myth.
The fact that it is utter bullshit is bad enough (see Steve Kornacki's excellent 2011 takedown on the matter), but for Paleologos to say that Perot cost Bush ... West Virginia?!?! Someone might want to let him know that West Virginia was once devoutly Democratic, and that even Michael Dukakis carried the state. Also, for what it is worth, Clinton outpolled his national average in three other states (Tennessee, Louisiana, and Kentucky) viewed by Paleologos as Perot-created opportunities for the Democrats.
The shame of it is this: Suffolk is a solid polling outfit. They've been in the top half of our Daily Kos Election pollster rankings two cycles running, one of the only three firms (PPP and Ipsos being the other two) to earn that distinction. But that doesn't make two cycles of analytical silliness of this magnitude any less cringeworthy.