Remember what I wrote just four days ago about Hillary Clinton having the potential to attract certain kinds of voters without moving to the left or the right to get them? Here’s some new evidence for that hypothesis.
I think it’s safe to say that Hillary isn’t enjoying this marked advantage among white women voters in the early polling due to any positions she’s taken on the issues, whether it be immigration, trade, gay marriage, guns, God or anything else. She’s getting more support from white women primarily because she is a white woman. And it would be wrong to assume that all these women who support Hillary but didn’t support Obama are racists. Some of them are, of course, but many just have an affinity for a candidate who is at least superficially more like them. Others just have positive associations with the Clintons, perhaps because their economic situation was more hopeful in the 1990s than it is today.
So, the next question everyone will ask is if all the McCain/Romney voters she’s gained will be offset by the Obama voters she loses. After all, many people voted for Obama for the same reasons of personal affinity rather than anything specific to his policy proposals. Won’t some of them flip over to the Republican now that the Democratic candidate doesn’t seem like so much of a personal representative?
It’s not possible to say for certain how Hillary will ultimately do with the Obama-specific Democratic base, but the early signs are pretty good.
This polling is confirmation of what I’ve suspected for a long time, which is that Clinton starts out with a bigger base of voters than Obama ever enjoyed. She can lose them, of course. She can fail to energize her core voters and lose a turnout battle. But the base of her support is very big, and certainly bigger than any that a Democrat has enjoyed since probably the mid-1960’s.
That’s the promise she has as a candidate.
Whether she can capitalize on it is a different question. I do, of course, have my doubts.
