Hillary appears to be stumbling a little:
Not only is this Clinton’s weakest favorable rating of the past year, but it is the lowest since 2008 when she was competing in that year’s Democratic primary elections. Prior to that, her favorable rating sank to 45% or lower at points between 2001 and 2003 when serving as U.S. senator from New York, and to 43% at one point in 1996 when she was first lady.
The latest rating comes from an April 3-4 Gallup poll, conducted roughly a month after Clinton began responding to criticism of her use of a private email server for official business while secretary of state and as news reports continued to indicate she was gearing up to announce her presidential candidacy. The previous result is from a March 2-4 survey, conducted prior to Clinton’s March 10 press conference in which she vigorously defended her email practices.
If her next poll indicates a continued plunge, it may be an opening for potential rivals, such as O’Malley and Biden. Eric Zuesse is convinced Hillary is doomed.
Her arrogance (or else stupidity) in having wiped clean the hard drive of the private server she had used for her emails while she was the U.S. Secretary of State adds insult to the injury already done to her incipient campaign by the earlier revelation that she had evaded the State Department’s record-keeping system and had used her private server for all of her State Department emails and not only for her personal emails. (The NYT had headlined March 2nd: “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.”)
