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MSNBC: Clinton's Drop in Favorability in New York 'More Than a Warning Sign'

Panel hits Clinton over Keystone evasiveness

September 22, 2015

MSNBC Morning Joe panelists said Tuesday that Hillary Clinton’s 21-point net drop in favorability in her adopted home state of New York is "a little bit more than a warning sign."

A Siena College poll found that Clinton’s favorability shifted from 56 percent to 46 percent since July, and her unfavorability shifted from 40 percent to 51 percent. The drop is the first time the majority of New Yorkers have viewed Clinton unfavorably. Host Joe Scarborough said that Scott Walker, who dropped out of the race yesterday, and Chris Christie, who faces low poll numbers, saw similar drops in their home states.

The panelists agreed that Clinton’s drop in New York is the result of "self-inflicted wounds," pointing specifically to her lack of transparency.

Columnist Ron Fournier said that when he told Clinton’s campaign staffers that without credibility, it’ll be harder for Clinton to win, they responded "trust doesn’t matter," citing Bill Clinton’s low trust numbers. He said that Clinton’s staffers are stuck in the 1990’ and "don’t realize how times have changed."

Former Bush administration official Nicolle Wallace said that Clinton should come clean if she wanted to gain favor with voters.

"I think she should crawl to the bottom, find out the ugliest truths about her own problems, and tell us what they are, and then climb back up and a lot of people will root for her," she said. "She does have decent numbers compared to others running. But I think that there's still this dread among Democrats that she hasn't reached the bottom yet, that another shoe could drop."

Scarborough added that Clinton’s refusal to take a stance on the Keystone XL issue, even though the State Department came out in support of it when she was secretary of state, is suspicious.

"The preposterousness of Hillary Clinton being asked twice over the last two months whether she supported Keystone or not and refusing to give an answer - two times saying she was waiting for the White House - was the most absurd answer," Scarborough said. "That would be like me running in Iowa for the Republican primary and someone asking my position on partial birth abortion and me saying ‘I'm going to wait until the White House comes out with a position, because I work at the White House, and that just wouldn’t be fair.’

"You can just hear the money sloshing around. There's a contributor or somebody there that's freezing her because this is one of the more unifying issues on the Democratic side of the aisle,"

"She’s making an obvious, very calculated political decision at a time people want transparency," Fournier added.