2016 Postmortem

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/06/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-popularity/

One of the more popular media memes of this election cycle is that we have “two historically unpopular candidates.” This meme simultaneously reflects the media’s obsession with “balance” (mistaking it for objectivity) and obscures how much Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a historical aberration, as well as the deeper problems that his candidacy embodies or symbolizes. In the cable news universe, no one invokes the meme more often than Trump supporters and surrogates.

There are at least three main problems with this meme. First, it’s a recent snapshot view, which clearly reverses cause and effect. Running for president has severely eroded Hillary Clinton’s popularity, due to the combination of intense political polarization and partisanship. On the other hand, becoming first the Republican front-runner and then the nominee has elevated Trump, bringing him in early September to his highest-ever level of national popularity.

Second, it ignores how popular Clinton was as secretary of state — much more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, her only “credible” competitor in elite circles at the time. Third, Clinton is not unpopular with nonwhite voters: African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all have favorable views of her, at least in broad strokes. The meme thus obscures the racialized nature of Trump’s and Clinton’s respective popularity problems.

As a public servant before this election cycle, Hillary Clinton registered broad public approval. From April 2010 through May 2011, her approval rating averaged more than 60 percent, as aggregated by HuffPost Pollster. Her disapproval rating was never above 35 percent. In fact, throughout her tenure in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, her negatives remained below that level, while her positive numbers never fell below 56 percent. Her popularity was both high and steady, especially compared with Obama’s sharp drop-off early in his first term as president, as he faced increasingly intransigent GOP opposition.

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As the chart below shows, her popularity fell as a consequence of entering into the highly polarized process of a presidential campaign, beginning just as these stories came out in early 2013. That was when the GOP began shifting the focus of its attacks against her — via multiple fruitless Benghazi investigations, for example — but that did not succeed in bringing her down into negative territory until mid-2015:

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