Why Is Hillary Running Left?

[IceSpear]

I disagree with the premise. Hillary has always been a liberal. The myth of the "far right neoliberal" Hillary Clinton is just that: a myth.

[IceSpear]

It's his article that he links in the RCP article.

Quoting from the linked article:

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Bolding the most problematic section for me. Why are we assuming these are the same voters here? Those statistics for both the white and the Hispanic electorate are more Republican than in 2012, especially for the latter. Trende seems to assume that difference is mostly driven by individual vacillation, but it could just as easily be driven by a differential effect on turnout rates with regard to ideology/affiliation, i.e. perhaps the left-leaners within each ethnic group did indeed sit out 2014 moreso than those on the right. You can't really get at this by comparing relative shares of the electorate. Some of the comments on Enten's 538 article discuss this.

Trende does try his hand at messing with ideology:

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"Just" three points. So their margin would change from 5.7 points to 2.7 points in the House. And that's at the pretty useless national scale, so who knows what that would look like at the state or CD level. (Not to mention the problems with self-identification of ideology...)

Now obviously demographics don't tell the whole story re: the Democrats' "midterm penalty." I think the difference in Obama's approval ratings certainly holds a lot weight here. But this just seems like quite a declarative conclusion given the flaws in the analysis.

Yeah, I thought that as well. He doesn't seem to consider the fact that the types of Hispanics who are more likely to vote in presidentials rather than midterms are also more likely to be Democratic/left leaning. I remember there being a thread about the "massive swing" to Republicans among the Asian vote from 2012 to 2014 which could also be explained by this theory.

[IceSpear]

I disagree with the premise. Hillary has always been a liberal. The myth of the "far right neoliberal" Hillary Clinton is just that: a myth.

Far right neoliberal is Reagan. The myth was that Hillary was a centrist.

Really depends what you're talking about. Within the Democratic Party, she's a centrist. Worldwide, she's a centrist. But in contemporary nationwide American politics, she's clearly a liberal.