Over the past couple of months, I have seen a lot of people on MyDD trumpeting the general election performance of Barack Obama or John Edwards in recent polls compared to that of Hillary Clinton as a rationale to support Edwards or Obama during the nomination campaign. I am not a Clinton supporter, but to be blunt I think that line of reasoning is a load of crap. Simply put, the relative performance of our top-tier candidates in general election polls against Republicans in early 2007 is not even close to a reliable indicator of their relative performance in such polls in eight, twelve or sixteen months. If you don't believe me, just consider the relative performance of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton against Republican opponents in early 2004 and mid-2006:
FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Jan. 21-22, 2004. N=900 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.
Bush 49%--42% Kerry
Bush 52%--39% Clinton
I hate having to use a Fox poll to demonstrate this point, but only Republican propaganda outlets are obsessed with Clinton enough to still have been polling her vs. Bush in the 2004 election cycle even after the Iowa caucuses has taken place. Still, my point is that at the start of the 2004 primary / caucus season, Kerry performed several points better against Bush than any other Democrat, including Hillary Clinton. Now, let's see how they performed relative to McCain two and a half years later:
Time Poll conducted by Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas (SRBI) Public Affairs. July 13-17, 2006. N=902 registered voters nationwide.
McCain 49%--47% Clinton
McCain 52%-42% Kerry
Gee, that changed, didn't it? Kerry started by performing six points better in a general election than Clinton, and finished by performing eight points worse.
The cause of this shift is obvious. At the start of the 2004 primary / caucus season, Kerry had a very favorable national image, but also one that was generally undefined and highly mutable. Over the next several months, Republican attacks against him severely lowered his favorables, and helped create an increasingly negative--and static--image of the man. Thus, while at first it seemed that Kerry was more "electable" than Clinton, by the end of the campaign he was probably less electable than her. Certainly, he was less "electable" by the time 2006 rolled around.
General election trial heats are not static over any great length of time because the national images of the candidates imvolved--including Clinton--are not static over any great length of time. To argue that Democratic candidate x is more electable than Democratic candidate y because the former scores a few points better than the latter on general election polls taken nineteen months from Election Day is the height of sophistry and folly when it comes to polling analysis. There is simply no reason to believe that, especially when Democratic candidate x has a far less static national image than Democratic candidate y (as is the case with both Edwards and Obama), and when Democratic candidate x has not dealt with anywhere near the level of attacks s/he will face in a general election setting (as is the case with both Edwards and Obama). To rephrase Gertrude Stein, there simply is no there there. Polling data on the relative Democratic candidate performance in the general election means absolutely nothing right now in terms of actual candidate performance in the general election. To think otherwise is simply delusional.
