2015-2025: A tale of three candidates
How has support for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump changed over the last ten years?
It is a testament to just how much American politics have changed over the past decade that literally no one in the media, as far as I can tell, has noticed some curious numbers published by YouGov / Economist this week: a poll on the favorability of Hillary Clinton. At the end of the Obama era reporting on Clinton’s favorability had become a nearly weekly ritual, largely because it was widely believed that she was about to become the next President. Today hardly anyone bothers polling about Clinton, and even when it does happen, nobody cares.
Still, this rare survey gives us good opportunity to quantify how American politics have changed since 2015. Fortunately, YouGov didn’t just publish numbers on Clinton this time around: they also published numbers on her Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders, as well as her general election opponent Donald Trump. So how have things changed? For this post, I will be comparing the latest numbers with a poll YouGov / Economist published in December 2015. To compensate for shifts in name recognition I have recalculated all percentages to exclude “don’t know” responses.
