Trying not start a flame war against Hillary-dislikers (see? I didn't say "haters.") I merely pass along a reasoned look at 2016:
Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly: "HRC’s Vulnerability Redux"
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/...
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that Hillary Clinton deliberately placed herself “to the right” of the President’s foreign policy in the famous Atlantic interview (I obviously don’t think so, but we’re “arguing in the alternative” here), or that she will do so in the future, as a lot of people who basically don’t like her and/or don’t like Democrats seem to hope for various reasons. Would that give the great chimera of a left-bent primary challenge to HRC the kind of specific impetus it needs to materialize?
Ed says our favorite (except when he disagrees with us) Nate Silver "takes a look at the idea of HRC’s left-flank vulnerability and finds no there there. She’s very popular with self-described Democratic liberals. And to those who say “yeah, but she was ‘inevitable’ going into 2008, too,” he responds that her overall positioning is much stronger now.
Nate:
It’s extremely rare to see a non-incumbent candidate poll so strongly so early. In the earliest stages of the 2008 Democratic nomination race, Clinton was polling between 25 percent and 40 percent of the vote — not between 60 percent and 70 percent, as she is now. Clinton could lose quite a bit of Democratic support and still be in a strong position.
But suppose you see those polls as a lagging indicator. Another early measure of a candidate’s strength that can have predictive power is the amount of support she receives from elites in her party, as measured by endorsements from elected officials. Clinton, despite not having declared her candidacy, has already picked up 60 endorsements from Democrats in Congress. As far as I can tell, there isn’t any precedent for something like this. A database of primary endorsements we compiled in 2012 found only a handful of endorsements of a presidential candidate so early in the race.
Ed closes:
Now: if Clinton woke up one fine morning and decided to make a speech on Wall Street celebrating her “close friends in the financial sector,” things could definitely change; then ... a scenario for a successful Elizabeth Warren challenge might become more realistic.
I suspect those who (again, for varying reasons) want to see a competitive Democratic nominating contest in 2016 know time’s running out, and are contributing to the media din over Stuffgate in an effort to shake things up.
Good luck with that.