General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What percentage of "very liberal" voters have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton? [View all]whatthehey
(3,660 posts)Hillary is not my preference, but she does not make me throw my hands up in horror either.
But even her most passionate fans and biggest distractors here seem to agree on one thing, with which I in the middle also concur: she is not at the furthest left of the party.
So this makes me wonder why the further left you go in polls, the more favorable her ratings. I've seen this in previous polls and it also echoes Obama's recent ratings, when he has also been disparaged by the further left here. It's not then likely to be sample bias or poor polling, although the MOE in this one is a bit high for my taste.
There are two likely reasons I can think of.
1) The more liberal the respondent, the more keen they are to demonstrate support for any Dem (the inverse seems to be true on DU, but this place very much is a self-selected biased sample on any issue)
2) The general media portrayal of Hillary reflects much RW attack points, which paint her as the avatar of Eugene Debs, and this sticks with the part of the populace who would actually prefer her to be that even though she's basically a center left pragmatist (again in reality not in DU terms).
Other reasons are possible I guess - gender bias? Relativism of self identified liberals such as that anyone in, say, Alabama would be considered a downright socialist if they wanted to tax billionaires a touch more and have internalized this, referring to themselves as more liberal than they really are? It would be interesting to see comparable results for a more obviously and media-portrayed left leaning option.
Would Webb or Manchin or Schweitzer, even less to the left, see similar liberal gradation in their favorables? If so that would lend credence to option 1, but getting big enough national samples would be tricky.