Subject: MUST READ: FiveThirtyEight: Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Have A Problem On Her Left
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 13:50:12 -0400
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*FiveThirtyEight: Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Have A Problem On Her Left
<http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-doesnt-have-a-problem-on-her-left/>*

By Nate Silver

August 13, 2014 1:22 PM

Hillary Clinton’s recent hawkish comments about foreign policy, in which
she expressed some disagreements with President Obama, have inspired
reporting and speculation that liberal Democrats will grow disillusioned
with her ahead of a possible presidential bid in 2016. There is a ”pattern
that has emerged in almost every recent interview Clinton has given:
liberals walk away unnerved,” Ezra Klein wrote at Vox.

The Vox headline proclaimed that Clinton is “not inevitable” — that is, not
the inevitable Democratic nominee. That’s right, narrowly speaking. Few
things are inevitable, and Clinton’s nomination is no exception. Although
she’s performing most or all of the activities that we’d associate with a
future presidential candidate, she’s not yet officially declared for the
race and could still decide against doing so. She could have health
problems, or a heretofore unknown scandal could emerge, or she could decide
that the 2016 climate has become grim enough for Democrats that the
nomination isn’t worth seeking.

But the odds that a challenger will emerge from the left flank of the
Democratic Party and overtake Clinton remain low.

As my colleague Harry Enten pointed out in May, Clinton has generally done
as well or better in polls of liberal Democrats as among other types of
Democrats. Between September and March, an average of 70 percent of liberal
Democrats named her as their top choice for the 2016 nomination as compared
to 65 percent of Democrats overall. An ABC News/Washington Post poll
conducted more recently showed Clinton with 72 percent of the primary vote
among liberal Democrats as compared to 66 percent of all Democrats. And a
CNN poll conducted last month gave her 66 percent of the liberal Democratic
vote against 67 percent of all Democrats.

The CNN poll is slightly more recent than the others, but if there’s been a
meaningful change in how rank-and-file liberal Democrats perceive Clinton,
you’d have to squint to see it. Perhaps more important, it’s extremely rare
to see a non-incumbent candidate poll so strongly so early. In the earliest
stages of the 2008 Democratic nomination race, Clinton was polling between
25 percent and 40 percent of the vote — not between 60 percent and 70
percent, as she is now. Clinton could lose quite a bit of Democratic
support and still be in a strong position.

But suppose you see those polls as a lagging indicator. Another early
measure of a candidate’s strength that can have predictive power is the
amount of support she receives from elites in her party, as measured by
endorsements from elected officials. Clinton, despite not having declared
her candidacy, has already picked up 60 endorsements from Democrats in
Congress. As far as I can tell, there isn’t any precedent for something
like this. A database of primary endorsements we compiled in 2012 found
only a handful of endorsements of a presidential candidate so early in the
race.

Moreover, these endorsements are coming from across the Democratic Party’s
ideological spectrum, including some of the most liberal Democrats. The
chart below depicts current Democratic senators ranked from left to center
based on their DW-Nominate scores (a statistical system that estimates a
member of Congress’s ideological position based on her roll call votes) and
shows which ones have already endorsed Clinton. (The chart excludes Montana
Sen. John Walsh, who took over for Max Baucus in February and has not yet
been scored by DW-Nominate.)

Regardless of ideology, every Democratic woman in the Senate has endorsed
Clinton — ranging from very liberal Democrats like Massachusetts Sen.
Elizabeth Warren to relatively conservative ones like Louisiana Sen. Mary
Landrieu. (If she appeals in the same way to women in the electorate, who
made up a majority of Democratic primary voters in 2008, she’ll be well
positioned in 2016.)

If you placed her on the chart, Clinton would fit squarely in the middle of
other Democrats in Congress based on her DW-Nominate score in 2007-08, her
last full term as a senator. That’s a good place to be, electorally
speaking. Presidential nominees tend to be pretty close to their party’s
ideological median as voters and party elites try to weigh electability
against ideological orthodoxy.

But aren’t Democrats growing more liberal? Yes, there’s some evidence they
are. Still, Democrats hold a fairly diverse range of interests and
ideologies. In the 2008 Iowa Caucus, 46 percent of Democratic voters
identified themselves as moderate or conservative; just 18 percent
described themselves as “very liberal.” (By comparison, only 11 percent of
Republican voters in that year’s GOP caucus said they were moderate or
liberal, while 45 percent said they were “very conservative.”) Democrats
could get quite a bit more liberal without being at risk of leaving Clinton
behind. Her base is broad and includes not only coastal liberals but also
groups such as baby-boomer women and working-class Democrats whose views
tend toward the center-left.

None of this is to say that Clinton should blithely dismiss criticism from
liberals. It could make it more likely that some credentialed candidate to
her left also runs for the Democratic nomination. That could have negative
consequences for Clinton even if the challenge is unlikely to succeed. But
for Clinton to lose the Democratic nomination for ideological reasons would
require a pronounced leftward shift in the party — something close to an
ideological realignment — and not incremental change over the next two
years.