Reply #64: Additionally [View All]

Name recognition plays a large part in how people vote. Hillary's recognition is, in part, due to Bill's popularity. This should stick a fork into our condescending friend's neutral assertion, "Hillary is not Bill".

I would also like to add, 99% of statistics are made up on the spot... including this one. It is worth assuming that "50% of Americans already hate Clinton" statistic was birthed via a similar conception. Republicans, in general, hold a particular loathing of the Clintons, but 50% of Americans are not registered Republicans. As of 2006, there are 72 million registered Democrats as opposed to 55 million registered Republicans and 42 million registered independents. By those numbers alone, it is impossible to deduce what percentage of American voters "hates" Hillary Clinton.

Furthermore, just because the Republicans have dumped a significant level of funding into discrediting Clinton doesn't mean they actually want to face her in GE, but merely that they are planning to face her in the GE. From where the current polls stand, it wouldn't be an uninformed maneuver to plan on Hillary taking the Democratic nomination. Furthermore, the Republicans may very well be reaching out to their comrades in open primary states, perhaps hoping to knock her out of the running in favor of what they perceive to be a weaker candidate.

All we can do is speculate, but if I were chairman of the RNC, I would want to avoid running a campaign against Hillary like the plague. She has name recognition and a degree of popularity, which means certain strategies are rendered useless. Furthermore, it would produce an expensive, contentious race. The situation that would provide the RNC with the best chance for victory would be a campaign between a high-profile, popular, nominally moderate Republican (like Rudy) against a no-name, no-platform, northern Democrat (like Dodd).