As Hillary! Craters, Democrats Search for Panic Button

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It’s no longer a question of whether Hillary! Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016; it’s only a question of when she will drop out of the race rather than face humiliation a second time:

Democrats are seeing warning signs after a new poll showed Hillary Clinton losing three swing states and deep in negative territory on questions of character. One Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity described the poll results as “the canary in the coal mine.” The poll, from Quinnipiac University, surveyed voters in Colorado, Iowa and Virginia. President Obama won all three states in both of his presidential election victories, but they went for former President George W. Bush almost as uniformly in 2004 and 2000. When the pollsters tested Clinton against leading Republican contenders Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, she lost every state to every opponent. Among the most alarming findings, from a Democratic perspective, was the indication that Clinton, widely considered the party’s front-runner, would lose Colorado by 9 points to Walker and would lose by at least 6 points to any of the three candidates in Iowa. Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based Democratic consultant who has worked with Clinton in the past but is not involved with her current campaign, described the findings as “absolutely dangerous” for the party.

Losing a state like Colorado by nine points to Scott Walker (who will be the GOP standard-bearer in 2016) would mean an electoral disaster for the Democrats is in the offing. If it’s not close in Colorado or Iowa, it means the Democrats would likely lose every swing state, including Walker’s own Wisconsin, and be confined to their electoral ghettos in New England and on the West Coast.

But it is not just the head-to-head match-ups where Clinton struggles. Other findings are also poor for her, including on the question of whether voters trust her. Those results seem ominous given that the former first lady has been in the public eye for around a quarter-century, making impressions of her more difficult to change. She has also struggled on questions of honesty before. The Quinnipiac poll showed Coloradans asserting by an almost 2-1 margin that Clinton was not honest or trustworthy: 62 percent said she was not, whereas only 34 percent she was. The findings were not much better in either Iowa or Virginia. Respondents distrusted Clinton 59 percent to 33 percent in the former, and 55 percent to 39 percent in latter.

Crazy as it seemed only a couple of months ago, look for both Al Gore and John Kerry to start testing the waters by the fall. Now, Democrats are running around with their hair on fire.