Don't take it from me and the Washington Post. Take it from Nate Silver:
NATE SILVER: The Bernie Sanders Surge Is About Bernie, Not Hillary
Hillary Clinton is beloved by voters in her party. In national polls, her favorability ratings among Democrats usually exceed 80 percent.
Nor do Sanders’s gains in Iowa and New Hampshire say much about Clinton’s vulnerability. This is easy enough to test. When a candidate gains relative to another, it could be because he is growing more popular, or because his opponent is becoming less popular. Horse-race polls, in which voters reveal only their first preference, won’t always be able to distinguish between these causes.
Favorability ratings allow us to say more. If Allen’s assertion is right — that Sanders’s gains represent an “anybody but Hillary” vote that could go to Biden — we should have seen a significant deterioration in Clinton’s favorability ratings. That’s not what we see, however. In the charts below, I’ve compiled all the favorability rating polls I could find among Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats since the start of the year. In Iowa, there’s been no change at all in Clinton’s ratings. Her favorability rating is about 85 percent, and her unfavorable rating is around 10 percent, right where it was in January.
Updated On: 7/17/15 at 01:49 PM
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