BobHarris.com - Zogby: Hillary Less Electable Than Ever

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Zogby: Hillary Less Electable Than Ever

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Sunday, 21 October 2007

Two bits of information which combine as unpleasant news for Democrats:

(1) Hillary's way ahead in the polls, with 43 percent of Democrats leaning her way, more than Obama and Edwards have combined.

(2) But while Democrats seem to have convinced themselves that Hillary is electable -- and who knows, at this point, given the stumbling herd of flip-flopping GOP torture advocates now lining up to debate -- a new Zogby poll shows that fully half of the electorate now firmly say they would "never" vote for Clinton under any circumstances.

Hillary's "never" number is higher than that of any other candidate, major or minor, in either party. Worse, that number is rising as the campaign goes on, up four points (and thus outside the margin of error) from the 46% who reported similar feelings in March.

(All of this is consistent with stuff that seemed pretty obvious here on the day she declared, although of course I could be wrong.)

But rather than bothering further about the horserace here, shouldn't we all be stepping back to marvel at just how dysfunctional our electoral system so obviously is? Bad enough our campaign finance structure and winner-takes-all system limit the spectrum of "mainstream" political opinion from conventional suck to full-blown delusional. But we're still more than a year away from the actual election, and our most likely leaders for the next four years have already been winnowed down mostly to people we already can't bloody stand.

Genius.