Name recognition driving Hillary’s high poll numbers?

A new poll out by Rasmussen seems to suggest just that:

A look at the crosstabs demonstrates that it is attitudes towards Clinton that are driving the numbers in this polling match-up. Among all voters, Clinton attracts 48% support. Among the voters who have never heard of Ron Paul or don’t know enough to have an opinion, guess what. Clinton attracts the exact same total–48% of the vote. So whether or not people have heard of Ron Paul as the challenger, support for Clinton doesn’t change.

Among the 51% who have heard of Ron Paul but don’t have a Very Favorable opinion of him, Clinton attracts 49% of the vote…

So, outside of a small group of avid Ron Paul fans, support for Senator Clinton is unchanged whether or not the survey respondent has ever heard of Ron Paul.

The Influence Peddler responds:

These are [ie, look like — the Editor] the polls of an unpopular incumbent, destined to be defeated for re-election: name ID is huge, voters’ opinions are set. When these are the last few polls that you see before election day, you recall that undecideds break against the incumbent by a huge margin. You conclude that it will take a miracle to pull through on election day.

You don’t quite draw such a conclusion this far out of course; election day is simply too far off and too much can change. The Republican opponent could be savaged in advertising, so much that he is unelectable. There might be a 3rd party candidate who reduces the threshold for victory. It’s even conceivable that you might be able to ‘reintroduce’ the candidate, and move some of the voters who seem so firmly against you. But a candidate forced to resort to one of these strategies is someone already in trouble.

I’ve said before that Hillary is the closest thing to a ‘status quo’ candidate there is among either Republicans or Democrats. In a change election, any Republican trumps her as the candidate of change. Now it’s gotten so bad for her that she’s starting to be viewed as almost the incumbent — a terrible place to be when the electorate is looking for something different.

Good points and indeed, I think it’s a little too early to be able to tell for sure whether or not Hillary is suffering from “incumbent’s disease” and if it will affect her next year – plus, as Jim Geraghty notes here, whether or not she is, Republicans are still going to need to come up with a winning agenda that gets beyond promoting themselves as the “anti-Hillary” candidates. The “I’m not Hillary” campaign slogan will only take them so far, even with the base, who are hungry for a candidate who has strong conservative credentials on fiscal and social issues, immigration, and fighting terrorism. Although I hope that, should Hillary become the nominee and the Republican nominee not be one the base is too keen on supporting, most conservatives who disagree on a number of key issues would eventually unite against her in the general election because they know what a Hillary presidency would lead to, I’m not so sure that will happen. And middle of the road voters, independents, and undecideds don’t view Hillary in the same light that conservatives do, so the Republican nominee would have to campaign on his strengths and not just his anti-Hillary credentials.

Related to all this is an interesting development out of Iowa. While Hillary has consistently led Senator Obama in polling the last several months (see poll averages here), a new University of Iowa poll has Obama pulling to within 2 points of Clinton, this roughly two months ahead of the Iowa Caucus. If Obama were to happen to win the Iowa Caucus, it would be a huge defeat for Hillary – and perhaps a strong indicator of what the future holds:

The Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary have been first for more than 30 years, causing candidates to devote considerable time and money there. Since 1976, the winners from Iowa went on to win six of eight Democratic and six of eight Republican primaries in New Hampshire. Seventy-five percent of Iowa winners became their party’s nominee.

The early primaries have also played critical roles in the battles for the presidential nomination — a poor showing in New Hampshire by President Johnson helped force him to bow out of running for reelection in 1968 and former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter beat several better-known candidates on his way to the nomination in 1976.

Stay tuned …

More: Steven Stark previews tonight’s Dem debate.