"Clinton's Surprising Advantages" (Polling demographics vs. 2004)

Clinton's Surprising Advantages
by Ed Kilgore, November 1, 2007

There's plenty of interesting stuff in the latest Pew Research Center national political survey, and I'll probably write about it some more later. But one set of findings that fairly jumped off the page involved the internal dynamics of Hillary Clinton's 51-43 lead over Rudy Giuliani in a hypothetical general election matchup.

Pew compared the two candidates' support levels in a variety of demographic categories to those of John Kerry and George W. Bush in 2004. And there were some surprises about where HRC is currently doing better than Kerry.

The categories in which HRC's advantage over Kerry as measured by total percentage of the two-party vote is highest are these: Southern voters (+13); voters believing the invasion of Iraq was the right decision (+12); and white evangelical Protestant voters (+11). She also bests Kerry by 9% among those reporting weekly church attendance, and by 7% among self-identified Republicans (as opposed to no advantage among independents and a drop of 2% among self-identified Democrats).

These aren't the only categories where the HRC does much better against Giuliani than Kerry did against Bush. Others include voters with no college education (+10); voters in both the top and bottom income categories (+8 for each); and least surprisingly, women (+8). But they certainly don't comport with the stereotype that HRC is a candidate whose entire appeal is to rank-and-file Democrats. (snip)

http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2007/11/clintons_surprising_advantages.php

I tend to agree with it.

The 'security moms' don't feel so secure any more.

But there are polls of roughly the same vintage that show contradictory results... I'll await more evidence...

simply an electorate increasingly fed up with Bush. In either case, it's a positive.

Whoever gets elected is going to face a mountain of problems that Bush is leaving behind and is going to need all the good will she/he can muster.

I think HRC and her team have a pretty good pulse on how much change a plurality or majority of Americans will embrace and have calibrated their positions accordingly...

The best product in the world is worthless is folks don't want to buy it and the best ideas in the world are worthless if you can't get a plurality or majority of folks to embrace it...