Hillary’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Favorable Ratings

We have been spending months talking about Hillary Clinton’s historically low ratings compared to past presidential candidates.

Our concern is people get inured to hearing this and, unless you really look at these numbers, you cannot appreciate how terrible Hillary Clinton’s favorable ratings are. So, we delved deeper into the data.

Below are basic sub-groups and the total net positive/negative rating, which demonstrate how negative Clinton’s ratings are compared to a very polarizing president in his re-election campaign.

Feeling Thermometer Comparison
(Total Positive – Total Negative)

total

The second chart highlights white sub-groups only. Obama had weak numbers among white voters, but this chart highlights Clinton’s truly awful numbers among these voters. She is a net -29 points lower among white college educated women compared to Obama. Her incredibly weak numbers with white men without a college degree are without precedent for a presidential candidate in Bill’s McInturff’s career.

Feeling Thermometer Comparison Among White Sub-Groups
(Total Positive – Total Negative)

white

As another comparison, Obama reached his lowest point ever with whites without college degrees (-32{09f965da52dc6ab4c1643a77bd40d1f729d807040cd8db540234bb981a782222}) in October 2014 and in January of this year. Hillary Clinton exceeded Obama’s low in July 2015 (-34{09f965da52dc6ab4c1643a77bd40d1f729d807040cd8db540234bb981a782222}) and took off like a rocket ship thereafter – her lowest point being April of this year (-53{09f965da52dc6ab4c1643a77bd40d1f729d807040cd8db540234bb981a782222}) and -47{09f965da52dc6ab4c1643a77bd40d1f729d807040cd8db540234bb981a782222} today.

The third chart shows the “very negative” number to again help highlight that as bad as Obama’s numbers were with Republicans, Clinton is still double-digits worse.

Feeling Thermometer Comparison
(Very Negative)

very neg

Finally, it is the last chart that – to us – is the killer: Clinton has a net positive rating among only FOUR sub-groups:

  • African Americans
  • Democrats
  • Liberals
  • Latinos

As we have been saying in many of our recent blog posts, we have NEVER seen anything like this. When talking in 2012, a common talking point was that “other than the Democratic coalition sub-groups (such as African Americans, liberals, Latinos, younger voters, people less than 30K, the Northeast) Obama had very few ‘up-for-grabs’ sub-groups where he had a net positive rating.” This format allows you to see how relatively fulsome Obama was in terms of having a net positive rating compared to Clinton!

Feeling Thermometer Comparison
Among Sub-Groups Where Obama is a Net Neutral to Net Positive

neutral to positive

What makes 2016 difficult to predict: Hillary Clinton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad favorable ratings that are unmatched by any other Democratic candidate for president ever.

Public Opinion Strategies