With less than two months until the first Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton’s in deep trouble: she’s trailing Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) in New Hampshire by 14 points.
Sanders, the self-avowed socialist, leads Hillary 56 percent to just 42 percent in the second-in-the-nation primary contest.
Worse for Clinton, just 49 percent of Clinton’s supporters say they are “enthusiastic” about her—while a whopping 76 percent of Sanders’s supporters say they’re enthusiastic.
The enthusiasm gap means that Sanders’s ultimate lead could be even larger than polls suggest—since more excited voters are more likely to go to the polls to vote.
However, Clinton got some good news in the poll as well.
While more people in New Hampshire prefer Sanders to Clinton, they like Clinton as well: 70 percent of Sanders friends say they like what Clinton has to say. Only 20 percent say they don’t like the things that Clinton is saying.
Part of the favorability for Clinton among the most liberal of Democrats comes from the fact that Hillary has moved far to the left on a number of issues—at odds with many positions she held just a few years ago.
She’s also been helped by Sanders—who has refused to ramp up attacks on Hillary. Sanders even famously gave Hillary cover in the first Democratic debate, when he responded to a question about Hillary’s email server scandal by saying that the American people were “sick of hearing about [her] damn emails!”
Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-Maryland), the only other Democrat running for the presidency, is a distant third in New Hampshire, and hasn’t seemed to gain much traction at any point of the race.
