NY Times hilariously spins awful Hillary polls: 'There's a lot of room for improvement!'

Whistling past the graveyard.

, --May 24, 2016

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I really don't even know why the Democratic Party spends a dime on communication staff. Why not just hand out copies of the New York Times to everyone? It would accomplish the same purpose, and most of the time they're all on social media posting links to the Times anyway. No matter what happens, the Times is there and ready to spin it to put the story in the best - or least bad - light for the Democrats. Those polls you've heard about in recent weeks that show Trump either pulling into the lead or quickly closing the gap? There's really no way to call that happy news for Democrats, but leave it to Timesman Nate Cohn to find a silver lining:
The prospect of another fairly close general election is not what Democrats were hoping for against Mr. Trump, but Mrs. Clinton will have a chance to widen the gap by winning over supporters of Mr. Sanders. Mr. Trump, despite his gains, now finds himself at around 42 or 43 percent in national polls. He still trails Mrs. Clinton in the balance of recent surveys, even though she is facing a divided Democratic Party. She is in the lead, in no small part, because there are simply more Democratic-leaning voters than Republican-leaning voters in the country. All but one of the most recent surveys show that there are more Democrats than Republicans. But Mrs. Clinton nonetheless struggles because of her inability to consolidate the independent-leaning, young, liberal supporters of Mr. Sanders. The most recent wave of national surveys shows Mrs. Clinton winning just 55 to 72 percent of Sanders’s supporters. She’s faring far worse among young and liberal voters than one would expect. The good news for Mrs. Clinton is that there’s a lot of room for improvement. She could make gains after winning the nomination, much as Mr. Trump already has. That could leave her with a considerable advantage.
Mr. Obama’s gains in June 2008 are probably the clearest precedent: He led by a wide margin until Mr. McCain won the nomination; he regained the lead after he was the Democratic Party’s choice.
So Cohn's theory is that Trump is now enjoying a just-won-the-nomination bounce, and once Hillary has done the same, she'll get one too. Presumably these would also be followed by post-convention bounces for both candidates. And hey, for Hillary, there's lots of room for improvement! A few problems with that theory. First, by what measure has Hillary not already won the Democrat nomination? Granted, Bernie Sanders hasn't given up and he keeps winning most of the primaries, but what difference does it make? Everyone knows the nomination is Hillary's regardless of what happens in the primaries because the superdelegates are going to save her. Up until Trump won Indiana, there was still some thought that Ted Cruz might at least be able to keep Trump under 1,237 heading into the RNC, so it really meant something when Indiana went for Trump, and Cruz dropped out. In Hillary's case, any official "clinching" of the nomination will be a mere formality, and it won't be the result of some grand primary triumph. It will be because the whole thing has been engineered so she can't lose. She's going to get a poll bounce from that?
Usually a candidate gets a bounce from his or her party's convention, and perhaps Cohn assumes this will happen for Hillary as well. Maybe it will, but the notion that it absolutely will cuts against one of my core beliefs where Hillary is concerned: The more people see of her, the worse her poll numbers get. The reason for that is obvious, and it's the one thing Cohn seems determined to avoid in his analysis: Hillary is awful. She's unappealing in every way, and has no worthwhile rationale to offer for why she should be president. She's a terrible candidate, a terrible politician and one of the most transparently phony human beings you will ever have the misfortunate of encountering. How is it going to go in the polls when people actually have to sit through a Hillary acceptance speech at the DNC? If Cohn really thinks that's going to help her, my guess is that he hasn't heard too many of her speeches. There's lots of room for improvement, all right! But there's not going to be any, not from a person as horrible as this. If she gets elected, it will be because the media has successfully sold Trump as some sort of monster - not because anyone really wants Hillary to be president. Because unless you stand to personally benefit financially from the graft she can toss your way, no one in their right mind would.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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