Open secret 4 years later…..
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by millions inspite of the fact that a LOT of people simply did NOT LIKE Hillary Clinton personally…..
Clinton and her husband carried a LOT of excess baggage that Joe Biden does NOT….
Some of those people WERE Democrats and Independent’s that had voted for Obama AND Joe Biden….
TWICE….
By indications?
A good amount of those people plan to come back to vote FOR Joe Biden….
Donald Trump and Republicans have NOT been able to tear down the good will ‘ole Joe’ has made with the public for decades…Especially with a chaotic and self- involved Donald Trump…..
AGAIN….
“I identify more with Biden — whether that’s being a male chauvinist, or whatever you want to call me,” he said.
The point seems almost too obvious to note: Mr. Biden is not Mrs. Clinton. Yet for many Democrats and independents who sat out 2016, voted for third-party candidates or backed Mr. Trump, it is a rationale for their vote that comes up repeatedly: Mr. Biden is more acceptable to them than Mrs. Clinton was, in ways large and small, personal and political, sexist and not, and those differences help them feel more comfortable voting for the Democratic nominee this time around.
Mr. Biden also benefits, of course, from the intense desire among Democrats to get President Trump out of office. And a majority of voters give the president low marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the dominant issue of the race. But a key distinction between 2020 and 2016 is that, four years ago, the race came down to two of the most disliked and polarizing candidates in American history, and one of them also faced obstacles that came with being a barrier-breaking woman.
Mr. Biden now leads Mr. Trump in many public polls by bigger margins than Mrs. Clinton had in 2016. In private polling and focus groups, voters express more positive views of Mr. Biden than of Mrs. Clinton, though they know far less about his decades in political office, according to strategists affiliated with both Democrats’ campaigns….
…
Even as Mr. Biden proposes a significantly bigger role for government than Mrs. Clinton did four years ago, some voters view the Democratic nominee as more moderate compared to how they saw her. And they don’t see him as being as divisive a political figure as they did Mrs. Clinton, despite Mr. Biden’s long record of legislative battles.
“I didn’t like Hillary — I felt that she was a fraud, basically, lying and conniving,” said Sarah Brown, 27, of Rhinelander, Wis., who regrets her 2016 vote for Mr. Trump and plans to vote for Mr. Biden. “I’m not a super big fan of him, either, but the two options — I guess it’s the lesser evil.”…
…
…Mr. Biden has never been torn down like Mrs. Clinton, who had faced more than two decades of unrelenting G.O.P. attacks by the time she ran.
Internal polling conducted for the Bernie Sanders campaign found that Mr. Biden had a reservoir of good will that Mrs. Clinton did not possess…
image…Ruth Fremson/The New York Times