Why the E-Mail "Scandal" Won't Hurt Hillary

One time classmate Larry Sabato has a piece at Politico that looks at why he believes the "e-mail scandal" the GOP is trying to fan into a conflagration will fail to hurt Hillary Clinton.  True, the conspiracy theory advocates in the GOP base will be all a twitter and the usually Hillary haters will be venting and engaging in spittle flecked rants.  But for most people, the "scandal" may more likely prompt a yawn. Especially among those turned off by the failed policies of the GOP and its agenda to create a new Gilded Age and special rights for Christian extremists.  Here are highlights from Sabato's piece:

The Hillary Clinton e-mail controversy is just the latest entrée in a decades-long, calorie-rich menu provided by the former first lady and her husband. But will it make a difference in 2016?

Scandal allegations are almost always an enormously time-consuming distraction and they make it virtually impossible to communicate a positive message during the feeding frenzy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the damage will be long-lasting. In this respect, presidential campaigns can be very different than those for lower levels.

At those lower levels of politics—House and Senate races, for example—there is considerable evidence that a scandal can wreak havoc and even defeat normally favored incumbents.

Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that scandal has a much less pronounced effect at the presidential level. For one thing, most elections for the White House revolve around macro-issues such as the economy and war, and voters instinctively realize that personal peccadilloes fade in importance. For another, most top-tier contenders are reasonably well known and have been vetted to some degree by the press and opponents in prior elections. When voters already have a clearly formed view of a candidate and his or her strengths and weaknesses, it naturally becomes more difficult to alter impressions.

For no one is this more true than Hillary Clinton, who has been in the national spotlight, center stage, for 23 years. 

[O]ver 90 percent of the public has already formed an opinion of Clinton, the most of any potential 2016 candidate. Other than the very youngest voters, is there really anyone left who doesn’t have a mostly fixed view of her?

You can argue that, to a lesser degree, the same is true for Jeb Bush. . . . Jeb is insisting he’s his own man, yet it will be nearly impossible to insulate him from the deep recessions and Mideast wars of his father and brother. With the good that derives directly from being a Bush (instant name recognition, establishment support, tons of campaign cash) comes the unavoidable bad of the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and economic near-collapse.

Even when scandals were prominent in the headlines or recent memory, they have only rarely had a critical impact on the selection of a president. If you examine the 29 presidential elections since 1900 to look for the dominant deciding factor(s), you’ll find that scandal has seldom played any conclusive role. The traditional, overriding voter concerns about the economy and war adequately explain the bulk of election outcomes.

So what does this tell us about Hillary's emails and the scrapes her Republican opponents are going to have while traveling 2016's scandal road? First, there is perhaps less to worry about than the distraught handwringing by pundits and activists suggests. And second, if a candidate is going to detour to the scandal trail, it’s far better to take the trip early in the election cycle. Commentators and partisans from the other camp will always remember and never forgive, but many voters are inclined to move on from “old news.”