Handicapping Hillary Clintons 2016 chances
Will Hillary Clinton be elected Americas next president?
The polls suggest she will. Recent polls compiled by Real Clear Politics show her winning 67 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries, with no other candidate above 11 percent. General-election polling shows her with an average lead over various possible Republican nominees of 51 to 39 percent.
But an election isnt over until it is over, and this one hasnt started.
For one thing, no one is sure whether Clinton will actually run. She turns 69 in 2016 (the same age as Ronald Reagan when he was first elected in 1980) and she may consider that her achievements in eight years as first lady and US senator, and four years as secretary of state, are enough for one lifetime.
Her achievements in that last office may look less impressive than they did in the first Obama term when majorities expressed approval of the presidents foreign policy. Clintons proudly proclaimed reset with Russia suddenly looks less like a triumph than a misfire.
Shes also had health scares: a blood clot behind her right knee in 1998 and another in her skull in December 2012.
The 2016 election will be only the fourth in the last 40 years in which the incumbent president wasnt running. In the previous three, the candidate of the presidents party ran roughly in line with the incumbents job approval. That produced a 53 percent to 46 percent victory for George H. W. Bush in 1988, a popular-vote plurality for Al Gore in 2000 and a 53-46 defeat for John McCain in 2008.
The odd thing about 2016 polling is that Clinton runs far above President Obamas job approval, while in the few polls pitting Vice President Joe Biden and others against Republicans, the Democrats run far behind.
Thats odd: Were in a period of straight-ticket voting, and in recent Senate and House elections, Democratic candidates have won percentages highly correlated with Obamas job approval.
One reason Clinton may be running ahead of the presidents approval is the high retrospective approval of Bill Clintons presidency. The 1990s are remembered (largely but not entirely accurately) as a time of booming job growth, technological progress, peace and American primacy abroad.
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