I understand your point Joe..however it is the wider communities fear based perception and not the facts that could push an extraordinary protest vote that will get Trump "accidentally" elected. It would be wise to not underestimate how much unspoken community concern there is.
As HC said in her 2nd debate, "These are extraordinary times and this is an extra-ordinary election" and sometimes a little "time" out on a major concern/issue may make all the difference.
This is interesting, and the reason why is that the only reason I disagree with you is a matter of degrees.
The kind of calculation you're discussing is something the proverbial Clinton machine excels at; to the other, it is exactly this Machiavellian, mechanical, nearly entirely relativist manner of market calculation that sets so damn many people against them. It's easy to exploit the appearance of cold political capitalism when it dresses a purported liberal. Yet on Wednesday morning, we will skewer the naïveté of the politician who skips out on such things for principle and thus dances into the Abyss. Hillary Clinton's negatives are extraordinary, but based largely on noise and bluster, which is why at the end of the day she continues to succeed. Some writer from California named
Paul Rosenberg↱ reminds, "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates'".
Except, well, we kind of do. But that's the thing. He's not wrong in what he actually means, just in stating it like that:
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 ....
.... In a telling snapshot, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll as Clinton left secretary of state post in January 2013 found her approval rating at 69 percent, “higher than any other outgoing secretary of state measured in a survey since 1948―with one exception: Colin Powell, whose approval rating was at 77 percent per a late 2004 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll.” That's hardly the sign of an unpopular political figure. Unsurprisingly, 92 percent of Democrats approved of Clinton's performance―but so did 64 percent of registered independents and even 41 percent of Republicans.
Two months later, Business Insider ran a story headlined ”Republicans Secretly Think Hillary Clinton Will Crush Them In 2016″ ....
... The story went on to cite a Quinnipiac survey that found Clinton leading both Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in Florida by 11 points, aided by a 62 percent favorability rating in the state.
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 ....
And it
is worth reminding:
"But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen."
Rosenberg is not wrong insofar as it goes. Furthermore:
There’s another way that the “unpopular candidates” meme gets things wrong and that’s when it comes to race and ethnicity. As reported by Becky Hofstein Grady, a SurveyMonkey election tracking poll of more than 91,000 registered voters in August clearly showed that Clinton was not unpopular with nonwhite voters:
Clinton’s unfavorability is driven mostly by White voters: Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters all give her net positive ratings. Trump, on the other hand, does not get a net positive rating among any racial group, even Whites.
‡
In short, Clinton is only unpopular with whites, more unpopular than Trump by a good margin, in fact. So the meme is also a way of cloaking unacknowledged racial animus, a sentiment that Bill Clinton famously co-opted with his “Sister Souljah moment,” but that Hillary apparently can’t avoid.
It’s worth reflecting back on Bill Clinton’s racial politics. The Sister Souljah incident was just one of many in which Clinton went out of his way to affirm his Southern white roots, even as he also did other things that clearly benefited African-Americans. America’s white majority was politically much more dominant in the early ’90s than it is now, and Clinton had built his career on adapting to that reality. Older blacks, who lived through those times, understand the logic of what he was trying to do, and tend to be deeply sympathetic to Hillary Clinton to this day, especially as she has moved forward. Younger black Americans, in contrast, tend to be more aware of the limits that the Clintons accepted — and strengthened. As Grady notes about Hillary:
Her favorability ratings improve with age among Black voters as well: the majority of Black voters 65 and older have a “strongly favorable” opinion of her (55 percent), while only 35 percent of those under 35 do. The Clintons have a long but not uncontroversial history of support from the Black community, and it could be that older Black voters are more likely to have positive memories of Bill Clinton’s presidency, while younger voters may focus more on problems with his legacy since then.
This brings us to a final point: Not only is it misleading to think of “popularity” without considering race; it’s also misleading to think of race alone. People are more complex than that, both individually and in social groups. Which is why pollsters and political scientists try to understand demographic groups. And here we find yet another way in which Trump’s unpopularity truly stands out as different and distinctive.
And even that is pretty impressive. Consider a broad Gallup survey exceeding 11,600 respondents in which, Rosenberg explains, "Clinton had a 40 percent to 33 percent advantage in favorability rating". The poll identified sixty-two demogrpahic subgroups; overall, Clinton won those subgroups 47-13, with two tied, but also managed to achieve fifty percent or better approval among fourteen of those groups:
As for Trump, he had 50 percent approval or more in exactly zero demographic groups. His best showings were 49 percent among males over 50, households that included military veterans and white males. He had above 40 percent approval, Clinton’s overall average, with just four other groups.
What all this means is that something more complicated is going on than the “two historically unpopular candidates” meme allows or prepares us to think about.
To bring that all around, we might simply consider that among those who don't like Hillary Clinton, it
is especially fierce. And, furthermore, her extraordinary negatives reflect this by leaving a smaller middle ground than most.
Still, though, she is not without significant support and historical popularity.
Rosenberg, of course, goes to all that effort in order to complain about the press, but neither is that aspect irrelevant.
Hillary Clinton is unpopular in part because of a steady drip of misinformation; combined with a superstitious presupposition that within that many lies at least one must accidentally be true there is also the general weariness of hearing bad news about Hillary Clinton―perpetual mudslinging has conditioned the audience to some degree.
The effect, of course, is what it is. You are not fundamentally incorrect; I just think that, overall, a calculated buckle to moratorium would cost her the election. Given a choice between Republican malice and a Democrat masquerading "Republican Lite", voters prefer the genuine article. Conceding the point with moratorium is a bridge too far.
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Notes:
Rosenberg, Paul. "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates': What the media gets wrong about candidate popularity". Salon. 6 October 2016. Salon.com. 17 October 2016. http://bit.ly/2e19pGd
