Buoyed by what most analysts proclaimed a victory in the first Democratic Presidential nomination wannabes debate, an 11-hour Benghazi hearing that even conservatives now believe was a Halloween-monster-sized mistake for Congressional Republicans, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going into full gear as the (largely) good news for her campaign continues.

The latest news: extremely good numbers in the latest poll from Iowa. The Washington Post:

If this month has been a giant, delicious cake layered with all of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s favorites, then Monmouth University just slathered on a whole lot of icing. Its new poll puts Clinton up 41 points in Iowa — the widest lead she’s seen there in any poll since June. Or: since before the Bernie Sanders surge.

It’s a lead so big that it is worth raising an eyebrow and holding at arm’s length, in the manner of a stereotypical movie detective. Hmm, one might say, turning it this way and that. Hmmmm.

It’s a good time to go back to the polling average compiled by Real Clear Politics. In an average of recent polls, Clinton is up in Iowa by a more modest 15.5 points — still more than enough to inspire a few high fives around the office in the manner of a stereotypical successful political campaign.

Let’s take the poll at face value. How could Clinton have gone from being up 11 in Quinnipiac’s poll just last week to 41 now?

We noted for a long time that we expected Clinton to benefit from the departure of Joe Biden; the two shared a large base of support. If you look at the trend in Iowa over the course of the month, Clinton was already gaining steam even before Biden bowed out. Now that he’s gone, it’s not surprising she would surge even further ahead. (We’ve included a “Biden+Clinton” line as a sort of guidepost of what we might expect Clinton to see if Biden’s base was 100 percent shared with her — which is an overestimation of what she’ll actually get but is still instructive.)

In the new Monmouth poll, Clinton leads with men by 22 percent and with liberals by 23. Both are areas in which she had been doing worse against Sanders.

What’s more, Clinton backers are far more likely to have made up their minds than Sanders backers — or than Democrats and Republicans on the whole.

The New York Time’s Nate Cohen argues that the Iowa Poll may not be indicative of the race:

I haven’t had much good news for Bernie Sanders supporters this year, so let me go out of my way to provide some today: There are very good reasons to question a new Monmouth poll that shows Hillary Rodham Clinton leading by 41 percentage points in Iowa.

Most other polls have tended to show a tight race, but Monmouth shows a blowout. Why?

One possibility is that Mrs. Clinton has made gains over the last few weeks, thanks to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race or her performance in the Benghazi hearing. But another possibility is the sampling frame of the survey. There are good reasons to believe that the Monmouth poll excludes many voters who are supporting Mr. Sanders.

What’s a sampling frame? Basically, it’s the people who could be selected to participate in the survey. According to the Monmouth poll’s methodology description, the poll’s sample was drawn “from a list of registered Democratic voters who voted in at least one of the last two state primary elections.”

These two conditions — being a registered Democrat and recent primary participation — exclude many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters.

Meanwhile, Sanders has blasted politicians who hire pollsters — and he has now hired a pollster:

Bernie Sanders, who has recently blasted poll-tested politicians, has hired a pollster of his own as his campaign enters a key stretch before the early nominating contests.

The Sanders campaign defended Monday their decision to hire former Howard Dean pollster Ben Tulchin, just a few days after Sanders knocked other politicians for taking politically convenient positions.

“Bernie has never been interested in polling but we convinced him we needed data for targeting,” said Tad Devine, Sanders’ top strategist, in a statement. “Now that we are going to do paid media next month, he approved having a pollster to give us the data we need to buy media correctly and target the ads.”

Sanders’ top aides, namely Devine, had been pushing for the campaign to hire a pollster, particularly because they wanted to test what aspects of the senator’s stump speech were resonating and which aspects weren’t.

She’s getting ready to launch a series of ads featuring working women, The Guardian reports:

As Republican candidates take the stage on Wednesday night for the next presidential debate, Hillary Clinton will begin airing a series of issue-based television ads featuring working women.

The four ads, each of which centers around a female protagonist, address middle class priorities such as instituting equal pay, expanding college affordability and raising incomes. Clinton provides a voiceover but does not appear directly in the ads, which will air on broadcast and cable in the key early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to a Clinton aide.

“On average, women need to work an extra two hours each day to earn the same paycheck as their male co-workers,” Clinton says in one ad.

“The top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” she notes in another.

The ads offer Clinton a prime opportunity, when millions will be tuning into the third Republican debate, to contrast her candidacy with those of the candidates onstage in Boulder, Colorado. The Republican candidates have uniformly dismissed, for example, equal pay as an issue – a point Clinton often highlights on the campaign trail.

….In Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton faces a competitive challenge in the Democratic primary from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Both candidates have discussed college affordability at length, albeit with differing proposals for how to ease the burden of students.

Clinton’s ads are nonetheless marked by an air of simplicity, in that each spot introduces an issue and closes with Clinton’s voice asking voters to “join the fight”. There is no mention of the views of rival parties or candidates.

The ads also provide Clinton with an opportunity to further capitalize on what has been the strongest month of her campaign thus far.

And she got a key endorsement:

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

Brown’s endorsement could matter among Ohio primary voters next March as Clinton vies with Bernie Sanders for the party’s nomination. Brown has long embraced the progressive label, taking positions more often affiliated with colleagues such as Sanders, of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts than with moderates such as Clinton.

Yet as she campaigns for president, Clinton has called for some of the same safeguards and protections as Brown, particularly with her recent opposition to the pending Trans Pacific Partnership.

She also recently called for getting tougher on financial abuses and excessive risk-taking by banks, supporting regulatory or legislative changes that could affect the nation’s largest depository institutions.

Brown has long staked positions against foreign trade deals that, he says, cost Americans their jobs, including deals crafted or implemented under Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton. The top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, Brown says government must provide a safety net and watchful eye to protect citizens from the greed of Wall Street banks, from factories that risk worker and consumer safety, and from drug companies that put profits above patients.

Republicans have long described Brown as among the most liberal senators, on the end of a spectrum that includes Sanders.

….With Brown on board, Clinton now has endorsements from a majority of Democrats in the Senate — 33 altogether, according to tracking by the website FiveThirtyEight. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who caucuses with Senate Democrats and is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has not been endorsed by any of his Senate colleagues so far.

But her stand on the VA crisis has sparked some backlash:

A declaration by Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton that the national crisis in care for American military veterans has been overblown by Republicans has stirred a backlash from advocacy groups and members of Congress from both major political parties.

During an appearance Friday on MSNBC, Clinton was asked by interviewer Rachel Maddow whether she had new ideas on how to solve patient-care and scheduling problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Clinton did not answer the question directly but said surveys indicate veterans are happy with their care and that she believes the scandal has “not been as bad as it has been made out to be.”

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a written statement Monday that anyone who denies rampant problems in the VA “isn’t paying attention.”

“Whether it’s continued delays in veterans’ medical care, the blatant waste of billions of taxpayer dollars or a rampant lack of accountability throughout every corner of the organization, there is simply no denying that the problems of the Department of Veterans Affairs are indeed widespread,” Miller said. “The VA scandal was caused by dishonest bureaucrats who chose to whitewash the department’s problems rather than solve them. Those who repeat that same shameful pattern of behavior are only shortchanging veterans.”

On Friday, she picked up some major union support that had been subject to a tug-of-war between her and Sanders:

Hillary Clinton’s good week just got better: She just picked up the endorsement of AFSCME, the massive public sector union whose support was coveted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s top rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The union’s 35-person International Executive Board had met with each of the Democratic candidates and nearly two-thirds voted to endorse Clinton, the union announced Friday.

“What we heard throughout our endorsement process is that AFSCME members want a candidate who is committed to fixing our out-of-balance economy,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in a statement. “What we also heard was AFSCME members want the candidate who will be the most effective champion for working families, and who will be able to deliver a victory in this critically important election. AFSCME members believe that candidate is Hillary Clinton.”

AFSCME claims to be the nation’s largest and fastest growing public services employees union, with more than 1.6 million active and retired members.

“Thanks for your support, brothers & sisters of @AFSCME. You never stop fighting for working families, & I’ll never stop fighting for you,” Clinton said in a personalized tweet.

Tuesday night she followed in the long line of Presidential hopefuls who appear on entertainment shows to win over younger voters and get voters to see them in a different, more human setting than on the stump. She went on Stephen Colbert’s new CBS show — but there was some serious talk:

Hillary Clinton told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday that, as president, she would let the big banks fail if they were to get into trouble.

That’s a departure from what her former boss, President Barack Obama, did in 2009.

“If you’re president and the banks are failing, do we let them fail?” asked Colbert, host of CBS’ “The Late Show.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Clinton said emphatically. “First of all, under Dodd-Frank, that is what will happen because we now have stress tests and I’m going to impose a risk fee on the big bank if they engage in risky behavior but they have to know, their shareholders have to know that yes, they will fail and if they’re too big to fail. Then under my plan and others that have been proposed, they may have to be broken up.”

The answer is the most direct Clinton has given on what would happen if the nation’s biggest financial institutions were to get into trouble if she were in the White House. Clinton has embraced Dodd-Frank, a financial regulation reform law passed in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, and has proposed increasing accountability on Wall Street by punishing criminal behavior and instituting a fee on excessive leverage and short-term borrowing.

Clinton rolled out her Wall Street plan earlier this month, announcing in a Bloomberg op-ed that she wants to crack down on abuses and tax certain kinds of “high-frequency” trading.

A CROSS SECTION OF TWEETS ON CLINTON AND SANDERS:

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

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.

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