A new Gallup Poll shows that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s image has improved among Democrats, coming on the same day that a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll finds she’d beat billionaire Donald Trump in a general election (but that poll also shows Vice President Joe Biden would enter the race as a highly popular candidate):
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s image has picked up among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents over the last two weeks. Clinton now has a favorable rating of 73% and an unfavorable rating of 20%, yielding an overall net favorable score of +53. Her net favorable score had dropped to as low as +46 earlier in September.
Gallup finds that Clinton has been on a political see-saw — and that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders seems to be holding firm:
From a big-picture perspective, Clinton’s image among Democrats clearly deteriorated as the campaign progressed during the summer and into September, in part as a result of the controversy over her emails while she was secretary of state. Her net favorable score had been as high as +62 in early August — thus leading to a 16-point drop between that time and mid-September.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ image among Democrats has plateaued well below Clinton’s throughout September, after having edged upward from early August. Sanders’ favorable rating is now 48% and his unfavorable is 12%, yielding his current +36 net favorable rating. Sanders has become more familiar to Democrats over the past two months, but four in 10 Democrats and leaners still don’t know enough about him to have an opinion.
Which means: with the possible entry of Biden, it is still Clinton’s to lose and she is making some progressive. But, unlike on the Republican side with some candidates, this person has not yet started to really sing.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.