Political junkies, even relatively casual ones, have long known that as soon as she stepped back into partisan politics, Hillary Clinton's favorable ratings would drop. During her time at the State Department and in private life, Clinton was an extremely popular figure, but we knew that would take a hit once she was under attack by Republicans and represented a choice on the ballot. The question was how big a hit and how she would compare to leading Republican candidates, and a new NBC News/
Wall Street Journal has
some preliminary answers:
In the new NBC/WSJ poll, Clinton's favorable/unfavorable rating stands at 42 positive, 42 negative (even) - down from 44 percent positive, 36 percent negative in March (+8).
Still, that break-even rating exceeds the fav/unfav scores for Republicans Marco Rubio (22 percent positive, 23 percent negative), Scott Walker (15 percent positive, 17 percent negative), Rand Paul (23 percent positive, 28 percent negative) and Jeb Bush (23 percent positive, 36 percent negative).
In head to head match-ups, Rand Paul comes the closest to Clinton, trailing by just three points while Bush and Rubio trail by six and Walker by 10. And then there's this:
The Latino Vote: In new NBC/WSJ poll, Hillary leads both Jeb (66%-28%) and Rubio (63%-32%) among Latino voters
— @mmurraypolitics
I guess Marco Rubio isn't a magic solution to Republican problems with Latino voters, after all. Gee, who
could possibly have
foreseen that?
Obviously, Clinton's name recognition is much higher than that of the Republicans, so they have more room to define themselves positively or be defined negatively by opponents. But so far, the drop in Clinton's favorables is no more than you'd expect given the relentless Republican attacks she's already facing, and her likely Republican opponents don't look poised to catch up with her—not to mention that they have to climb over each other to get to the nomination to begin with.