Hillary Clinton's poll numbers haven't dropped at all—and this one chart proves it

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

It's been inescapable for weeks: Beltway hacks have been braying about Hillary Clinton's "falling poll numbers," eager to fan the flames of Democratic discord and generate column-inches about intra-party conflict where none exists. What's most pathetic about this latest anti-Clinton drumbeat, though, is how it's directly contradicted by, well, the polls.

The chart above shows a combined average of every single national poll taken since March 1 of this year that pits Clinton against the 10 leading Republican candidates—197 matchups in all, courtesy of Huffington Post Pollster. The key takeaway, as you can see from the blue and red trendlines, is that the race has been remarkably static.

In fact, at the beginning of March, Clinton led the GOP field by an average of 50.3 to 42.6, or 7.7 percentage points. Now, in late August, she leads 48.7 to 41.2, or 7.5 percent. Clinton's "collapse," in other words, is 0.2 percent! No serious analyst would consider that anything more than a rounding error. (And we're not cherry-picking the start date, either: The picture is the same if you dial it back to Jan. 1.)

So what are these pundits on about? Well, they're very focused on Clinton's favorability rating, which has indeed trended negative over this same timeframe. But it's also been headed downward for years—long before anyone ever heard about any email servers—and for a very simple reason: When you leave a high-profile, nonpartisan post like secretary of state to run for elective office, you can't possibly sustain the broad appeal you once did when you were globe-trotting to meet with foreign leaders. As soon as you're back in the muck of the campaign trail, you're going to get viewed through the polarized prism of American politics. For Clinton, it was a predictable development that many did indeed predict.

Now of course any politician wants her favorability numbers to be in positive territory. But it doesn't matter nearly as much as you might think, because if you're running for president in this 50-50 nation of ours, there's a very good chance your opponent is also under water. Clinton's favorables, according to HuffPo's average, stand at 42-50 today—not great, but Jeb Bush's are quite a bit worse, at 33-47. Yet we haven't seen panicked media reports about Jeb's lousy numbers. That ought to tell you something.

Want an even sharper contrast? Look at Donald Trump: He's at just 37 percent positive to 56 percent negative. In fact, every single Republican contender tracked by HuffPo (except for Ben Carson) currently sports a negative favorability score. This is why pollsters test direct head-to-head matchups between actual candidates, because favorability ratings can only tell you so much. If you have two popular—or unpopular—candidates, someone still has to win.

And the person who's winning is Hillary Clinton. She was winning half a year ago, and she's still winning now. Could that change by next year? Of course. But the point is that despite efforts to foment panic in certain quarters, nothing's changed in the last six months. If Clinton's margins were to remain the same going forward (and she were to secure the Democratic nomination), she'd win as big a victory as Barack Obama did in 2008. If anyone should be worried, it ought to be the Republicans.