Hillary Clinton’s Got This (Hillary Clinton Group) [View all]

[lunamagica]

HER favorable ratings have fallen. The investigation into her private email server is tightening. Bernie Sanders is drawing huge crowds. Joe Biden is considering one last White House bid. Al Gore has advisers who have friends who’ve told reporters that they might have heard about conversations spitballing about a possible Gore run.

And as for the pundits — like, yes, yours truly — who once said that Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, well, did we expect that Sanders would top a New Hampshire poll? (Truthfully, I did not.) Did we even see the email scandal coming? (Well, I expected something Clintonesque, but the specifics have surprised.) For that matter, did we foresee Donald Trump’s swift ascent on the G.O.P. side of things? (No, I didn’t think he would run at all.)

So with that kind of track record from the soothsaying profession, isn’t it possible that our entire “Hillary Clinton is the inevitable Democratic nominee” thesis is about to become a casualty of State Department scandal, Clinton fatigue, her weaknesses as a campaigner, the populist temper of the times?

Many things are possible. But to this soothsayer, it feels like a good time to double down on that thesis instead, and make my prediction as firm and wiggle-free as possible: Hillary’s going to win the nomination, and it isn’t going to be particularly close.

First and foremost, she’s going to win the nomination because she only needs Democratic votes to win it, and Democrats still like Hillary — a lot. She looks today like a somewhat weaker general-election candidate than she did six months ago, and the Sanders surge has been fun to watch. But mostly he’s just been consolidating the party’s natural anti-Clinton bloc — white, well-educated, and quite left-wing — rather than making deep inroads into her national support.

That anti-Hillary bloc is overrepresented in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where Sanders’ poll numbers are particularly robust, but it isn’t the basis for a winning coalition; not even close. For that, you would need a candidate capable of performing the same feat as Obama in 2008, and winning not only white liberals but a large share of minority support (an overwhelming share of the black vote, in his case) as well.

And none of Hillary’s possible rivals, real and hypothetical, are well-suited to building that kind of coalition. Sanders is already enduring left-on-left clashes with “Black Lives Matter” activists, the hapless Martin O’Malley is associated with Baltimore policing, and given the front-runner’s pre-commitment to a voting rights push and criminal justice reform, it’s not clear what Biden would offer minority voters to make them reconsider their strong support for Clinton.

Any other path to the nomination, meanwhile, requires persuading white Democratic women to turn on Hillary en masse — an even more unlikely scenario, it’s fair to say, than imagining Biden as a Rainbow Coalition candidate.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-hillarys-got-this.html