OR-Clout Research: Clinton low energy; Oregon wants to make America great again

[NOVA Green]

Oregon? I never would have thought. But then again, they love Bernie. Still, this is a stretch.

As I have stated before on multiple threads there will be a significant decrease from Obama support, caused by an effective collapse of her support among downstate Democrats and Democratic leaning Independents.

Based upon Democratic Primary results in Washington and Oregon, she has effectively lost a huge chunk of the base Democratic vote in regions that have been gradually trending Republican, including historically heavily Democratic blue-collar and union regions of the state.

Regardless of the media hype regarding Millennials, the real threat to Hillary is from middle-age and older voters that have been part of the Democratic Coalition since the New Deal that feel abandoned by the Democratic Party, that since the 1990s has moved towards a more corporate model and left behind key segments of the party base and not just a handful of young voters in Eugene and Corvallis during the current primary season.

Trump winning Oregon is still a total pipe-dream, but I do believe that he will likely keep Hillary down to an 8-10 point win, and possibly lower depending unless Hillary can actually communicate a message that speaks to rural and small-town America, including Democratic strongholds, without doing some of the shtick that she did in the primaries framing Bernie as a Gun Nut, promising to close down resource dependent sectors of the economy, and acting like a typical politician, flip-flopping on Free Trade, with TPP being one of her signature achievements at SoS, which is not that major an issue in Southern Oregon, but shows a certain lack of character that we are used to voting for elected leaders both Republican and Democrat.

[NOVA Green]

So the stereotype of Oregon being a state full of angry Bernie Bros. is true?

This is a Republican firm.

Is there a proven relationship between a pollster being a member of a political party, and the results of their polls being skewed toward that party?

I'm not trying to make a pointed remark or anything; I'm genuinely curious.

No... the reality is that Hillary has been an extremely poor candidate in terms of holding and expanding the Obama coalition.

The fictional "Bernie Bros" are not the issue, this is simply a media storm to describe a fictional stereotype of a fractional minority of Bernie supporters that are white males under the age of 30 and hate women... Or so I understand the stereotype to be.

The issue is that Hillary has done an extremely poor job of communicating the Progressive Democratic message in places like Coos, Columbia, and Linn county Oregon, as well as Clark and Lewis County Washington that is representative of a collapse among a segment of the Democratic electorate where she did much better than Obama in the '08 primaries who over-performed in major urban areas of the Pacific Northwest mainly because she was perceived as a pro-Iraq War hawk, but did extremely well in those same areas in '08 when she was perceived as more credible on economic issues.

Her major problem has to do with a perception in solid blue Democratic areas in the Rural, Small Town and Smaller Cities (true or not) that she basically wants to continue the policies that many working-class Democrats in those areas feel has caused a dramatic decrease in our standard of living over the past 20+ years, ever since the Democratic Party moved to the Right in the 1990s, and the only thing stopping the bleeding was that the Republican Party was moving even further to the Right on economic issues.

Sadly, I fear that Hillary will have a hard time communicating a progressive democratic agenda that talks to the experience of a key segment of the Democratic electorate that feels abandoned by their own party, and by default drifts into the slippery slope of Trumpism.

[NOVA Green]

Yawn.  BTW, it looks like the primary pollster for "Clout Research" is Fritz Wenzel, of the awful, super R biased Wenzel Strategies, which produced gems like this in 2012:  http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/wenzel-strategies-r-citizens-united-16430.

I do think Hillary can underperform Obama in Oregon, perhaps depending on the level of support Bernie gives to Hillary.  But she is no danger of losing the state except in an 7-10 point Trump landslide.

Absolutely agree that Oregon will not be a swing state in 2016, and that it would something like a Trump landslide to flip the state.... s**t the state hasn't voted Republican since 1984, even then it was only an 8 point Reagan win when he was winning 60-40!

My major concern is with the erosion of Democratic downstate support over the past few decades, and anyone that thinks that Obama style margins will continue in Multnomah County forever is living in a world of illusion when Metro-Portland only accounts for a little over 50% of the statewide vote.

That being said, I can easily see Hillary only winning Oregon 54-46 or 53-47 with a national win of 51-49 or 52-48.