Hopelessly Addicted To The Bill-Hurts-Hillary Narrative
February 1, 2008 -- 9:21 AM EST // //
Yesterday I noted that the exit polls from recent contests are inconclusive on the question of whether Bill's antics have damaged Hillary's candidacy to the extent pundits and commentators claim.
Today, The New York Times's Kit Seelye takes a look at the exit numbers and concludes the opposite -- that Bill did in fact damage her in the South Carolina primary:
But deploying him full time in South Carolina may have backfired after he began to dominate the news in an increasingly negative light. Fifty-eight percent of voters in South Carolina said Mr. Clinton’s campaigning was important to their vote — and almost half of them voted for Mr. Obama, who received 80 percent of the state’s black vote and beat Mrs. Clinton in a landslide.See, I think the picture is far more complicated than this. Let's take a look at all the South Carolina exit poll numbers on this question:
The number Seelye cherry-picked out of here is accurate, but what does it really tell us? Nothing, I submit. After all, Hillary lost among voters who say Bill was "important" to their choice by a significantly smaller margin than she lost the overall vote by. Indeed, taken all together these numbers could also have produced a paragraph like this:
Many commentators say that Bill's outbursts damaged Hillary in South Carolina, but exit polls suggest that this may not be the case. Obama beat Clinton by a margin smaller than his overall victory among voters who said former President Clinton was "important" to their vote. What's more, Clinton did nearly three times better among voters who said he was "important" to their consideration than she did among voters who said he was "not important" to it. Among voters who said he was "very important," Clinton beat Obama. The size of Clinton's vote percentages were higher in direct proportion to the degree of importance voters accorded the former President.Let me be clear: I'm not saying that my interpretation is right and that Seelye's is wrong. I'm just saying that the numbers plainly support both interpretations. Did Bill's escapades turn off some voters? Almost certainly, but clearly, the picture is much more complex than this simplistic narrative-of-the-moment has it. The point is, the exits are inconclusive on the question, but Seelye nonetheless made an editorial decision to use that number to tell the story her way.
Will Bill prove to have damaged Hillary among voters in the long term? Again: It's perfectly possible. But we simply don't know right now. What is obvious, though, is that this sort of interpretation tells us far more about the obvious desire some political reporters have for the story to be that Bill is destroying Hillary's candidacy than it does about what's actually happening here.
The comments section is broken and currently undergoing repair. To reach the homepage of this blog, click here.