Hillary Clinton's Historic 2016 Primary Advantage in Two Charts

The Democratic frontrunner is running twice as strong as she did at this point in the 2008 cycle.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers a keynote address during the 2014 DreamForce conference on October 14, 2014 in San Francisco, California. The annual Dreamforce conference runs through October 16.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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By David Weigel

December 3, 2014 at 2:14 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

There are oodles of silly tropes in politics, but in the winter of 2014, this might be the silliest: “Hillary Clinton seems inevitable now, but wasn't she inevitable last time?” It's a blinkered way of viewing presidential politics, and the latest CNN/ORC International poll demonstrates why.

First, the numbers. CNN's poll, conducted right before Thanksgiving with a sample of “1,045 adult Americans,” finds the former secretary of state far ahead of the Democratic field in a national ballot test. Clinton's at 65 percent support among Democrats, followed by Senator Elizabeth Warren at 10 percent, Vice President Joe Biden at 9 percent, Senator Bernie Sanders at 5 percent, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Governor Deval Patrick and (the only candidate so far exploring a bid) former Senator James Webb at 1 percent, and Governor Martin O'Malley with support too low to calculate.