There must be something wrong with PPP's latest poll, which "finds Hillary Clinton leading all of her potential Republican candidates by between 7 and 10 points." I'm not skeptical of Hillary's overall lead, but I am skeptical of its parts, which make little sense:
She has 7 point advantages over Rand Paul (47/40), and Rick Perry and Marco Rubio (48/41). She has 8 point advantages over Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker all at 48/40. Her advantage over Mike Huckabee is 9 points at 50/41, and she's up 10 points each over Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz at 50/40.
I appreciate that PPP is reporting within margins of error, but at their extremes the margins are exceedingly suspicious. Clinton would best Bush by more than she would beat Rand Paul, or the inimitable Rick Perry? — who can't even get a foothold among the Republican base? Those findings are more than peculiar. They're unbelievable. And any finding that puts Jeb Bush in the same electoral neighborhood as Ted Cruz is surely an outlier.
That said, PPP's overall finding is consistent with other polls of late — most have shown high single or double-digit leads for Clinton over the oppositional pool. And the rule of thumb is that popular-vote leads approximating 10 percent render the leader statistically unbeatable in the Electoral College. For a national lead to reach 10 percent (or thereabout), battleground states must on the whole be favorable to the leader.
What's Hillary's secret of success? It's kind of a musical Broadway thing. She stopped doing interviews after her book tour, which is to say, she shut the hell up and stopped really trying.
Off topic but I just know you wouldn't wish to miss it, Eric Holder's 'apparat', the (so-called) Justice Dept., has decided to take no action against Zimmerman. That's "no" as in 'nil', 'zilch', 'nada'. Whodathunkit?
Posted by: David & Son of Duff | February 25, 2015 at 03:15 PM