All summer, Hillary Clinton insisted that voters simply weren’t interested in her use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State. “It’s not anything that people talk to me about around the country,” she said at the Iowa State Fair on August 17. “Nobody talks to me about it except you guys,” she told reporters a day later.
But a new word-association survey released Wednesday by Gallup contradicts Clinton’s assertion that few people outside of the media are paying attention to her ongoing e-mail scandal. When asked to respond immediately to the mention of the Democratic frontrunner’s name, Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly thought of one word: “E-mail.”
As part of a late-August poll tracking the verbatim responses of Americans to the names of all U.S. presidential candidates, Gallup spoke with 750 adults familiar enough with Hillary Clinton to give an opinion. 329 of them replied with either “e-mail,” “e-mail scandal,” “private e-mail,” or some other variation.
Another 83 respondents mentioned the word “server,” a reference to the private server on which Clinton is accused of improperly storing classified government documents. Altogether, more than half of those surveyed thought immediately of the e-mail scandal when presented with Clinton’s name. (“Benghazi,” the Libyan city where four Americans were killed, touching off another Clinton scandal, was a popular alternate response.)
#share#Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server has been extensively covered by the press since news of its existence first broke in March. That coverage spiked following the revelations that classified material was improperly retained over the unsecured network, and that the FBI was investigating the Democratic frontrunner for mishandling such material.
#related#“E-mail” was the top response to Clinton’s name even among the Democrats polled, suggesting that the Clinton camp’s effort to deflect attention from the controversy by focusing on detailed policy proposals has fallen short. Virtually no words regarding the candidate’s policy platform were offered by respondents.
Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was included in the same poll. But in a marked contrast to Clinton, policy proposals overrode any scandals or controversies surrounding the real-estate mogul. The dominant word respondents used to describe him was “immigration.”
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.