Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Have A Problem On Her Left
1:22 PM Aug 13, 2014 By Nate Silver
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Regardless of ideology, every Democratic woman in the Senate has endorsed Clinton — ranging from very liberal Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to relatively conservative ones like Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu. (If she appeals in the same way to women in the electorate, who made up a majority of Democratic primary voters in 2008, she’ll be well positioned in 2016.)
If you placed her on the chart, Clinton would fit squarely in the middle of other Democrats in Congress based on her DW-Nominate score in 2007-08, her last full term as a senator. That’s a good place to be, electorally speaking. Presidential nominees tend to be pretty close to their party’s ideological median as voters and party elites try to weigh electability against ideological orthodoxy.
But aren’t Democrats growing more liberal? Yes, there’s some evidence they are. Still, Democrats hold a fairly diverse range of interests and ideologies. In the 2008 Iowa Caucus, 46 percent of Democratic voters identified themselves as moderate or conservative; just 18 percent described themselves as “very liberal.” (By comparison, only 11 percent of Republican voters in that year’s GOP caucus said they were moderate or liberal, while 45 percent said they were “very conservative.”) Democrats could get quite a bit more liberal without being at risk of leaving Clinton behind. Her base is broad and includes not only coastal liberals but also groups such as baby-boomer women and working-class Democrats whose views tend toward the center-left.
None of this is to say that Clinton should blithely dismiss criticism from liberals.
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