Subject: Fwd: HRC
From: Cheryl Mills <[email-masked]>
To: Robby Mook <[email-masked]>, David Plouffe <[email-masked]>, John Podesta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 23:08:08 -0400

Hillary Clinton Doesn't Need Liberals; The numbers show black voters
defeated her in 2008 and will make her win in 2016.
By Jamelle Bouie
Slate
Tue, Jul 1, 2014

Somehow, six years after a divisive, bitter primary against a liberal
challenger, Hillary Clinton has become the darling of the Democratic left.
To liberal Democrats, she's more "tough," "honest," and exciting than any
figure in the party. As Noam Scheiber writes in an excellent feature on
Clinton and the left for the New Republic, "it's a striking turnaround for
a candidate who, when her opponent famously proclaimed her 'likeable
enough' in 2008, discovered that less than half her party agreed.

For Scheiber--who pegs the change to partisan solidarity--liberal support is
key to Clinton's presidential ambitions, if she runs. Without dissatisfied
liberals to fuel an anti-Clinton insurgency, he argues, the former
secretary of state has an easy path to the nomination, even with her
liabilities on income inequality and her close relationship to Wall Street
and other titans of the 1 percent. "What's so unusual about Clinton's
standing is that, unlike 2008, it's almost certain to hold up even against
a perfectly positioned challenger--say, Elizabeth Warren, the most beloved
economic populist in the country," writes Scheiber.

At the risk of nitpicking, I think it's wrong to call Warren "perfectly
positioned." Not because she isn't talented and popular, but because
liberals--or at least, self-identified liberals--aren't enough to win a
Democratic primary.

Key to Scheiber's case is the idea that liberals killed the Clinton
candidacy of 2008 and could do the same in 2016 if they backed Warren or
another credible challenger. But while liberals were a necessary part of
the Obama insurgency, they weren't sufficient to stop the Clinton machine.
To wit, self-identified liberals were just 39 percent of all Democrats in
2008, followed by moderates (38 percent) and conservatives (21 percent). Or
you could just look at Clinton's record in the primary, where liberal
opposition couldn't block her victories in New Hampshire, California, New
York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, and Arizona.

Clinton's problem had less to do with liberals and more with
African-Americans, who formed a critical share of the Democratic primary
electorate. Scheiber points to this in a footnote, but it's worth a full
take. Put simply, a Democratic presidential candidate can't win the primary
without substantial support from black voters, who tend to vote for the
establishment choice. Accordingly, it's when African-Americans back a
challenger that the establishment candidate falters, which is to say that
if Hillary Clinton had kept a decent share of the black vote, she would
have become the Democratic nominee, regardless of liberal disdain for her
candidacy.

Hillary Clinton's strength comes from her position with black voters.

To see this, you just have to look at the numbers. As the year wore on,
Barack Obama was winning black electorates by huge margins of 8- or 9-to-1
in delegate-rich states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and
Georgia. In states where Clinton was weak, like Illinois, this gave Obama a
huge victory outright, with an abundance of votes and delegates heading to
the convention. And in states where she was strong, like Pennsylvania, this
allowed Obama to play a close game and win a respectable number of votes.
As political scientist Tom Schaller noted toward the end of the primary
season, "Clinton squeezed out the same number of net delegates from her
17-point win in New York and 9-point win in Pennsylvania as Obama did in
his 31-point win in Illinois--even though New York and Pennsylvania combined
... awarded nearly two and half times the delegates that Illinois did." And
while a modest increase in Clinton's black support--from 10 or 15 percent to
20 or 25 percent--may not have been sufficient to win her a delegate lead,
as Schaller later points out, it could have swung the popular vote in her
favor.

I can imagine the objection. Obama was viable and black. Clinton didn't
stand a chance with African-Americans. But that's a bit of revisionist
history. Remember, for all of 2007, Clinton held the lead with
African-American voters. In one August poll by the Pew Research Center, 94
percent of black Democrats held a favorable view of Clinton, compared with
88 percent for Obama. In the same poll, and 47 percent supported her
candidacy, compared with 34 percent for Obama. Likewise, an October CNN
poll found that Clinton was supported by 57 percent of African-American
Democrats, versus 33 percent for Obama. And toward the end of the year,
Clinton continued to hold a favorability advantage, with favorable ratings
from 83 percent of blacks, versus 74 percent for Obama.

Obama's huge black support only came after his first place finish in the
Iowa caucuses in January 2008, where he proved himself a strong candidate
with broad appeal. And once it did, he quickly became a credible candidate
in a way that escaped similar liberal challengers, like Howard Dean in 2004
or Bill Bradley in 2000, who couldn't build the same foothold. What's more,
he was helped along by the Clinton campaign's missteps with black
voters--from Bill's "fairy tale" description of Obama's chances to her
argument that she was a better candidate to win "hard-working Americans,
white Americans."

Absent Clinton's tactical and rhetorical mistakes, she could have held on
to a substantial chunk of the black vote, denying Obama the lopsided
margins he needed to win--even if he held the majority of liberal support.

Which brings us back to the present. Yes, Hillary Clinton benefits from her
new popularity with liberals, but her strength comes from her position with
black voters, who seem committed to a Clinton candidacy. And as long as
that's true, Hillary Clinton can't lose the 2016 Democratic primary, period.

So, if you're among the people pushing Elizabeth Warren to run for the
nomination, here's a suggestion to pass along. If Sen. Warren is interested
and wants a chance to win, she should spend a bit less time in Oregon and
West Virginia, and a lot more in South Carolina.

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