Witness the Devastating Impact the Benghazi Story Has Had on Hillary Clinton’s Poll Numbers

Public Policy Polling has come out with some of the more trollish-yet-useful polls of the 2016 race. (By definition, any 2016 poll conducted in 2013 is trollish.) Because they always put a ballot test in the questionnaire, PPP’s robots get a pretty lean, accurate measure of what people think of the candidates as candidates, not as famous people. So. In February, they found this rating for Hillary Clinton, much softer than her usual +30 point favorable rating.
Yesterday, the robots returned with a new study of 2016. It had been a full week since documents started tarnishing her State Department’s role in Benghazi spin. Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar has played the short version* of Clinton’s answer to Sen. Ron Johnson—the “what difference does it make?” tape—in front of Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks. Hicks basically condemned the thought on live TV. The damage:
* Republicans typically cut off the Clinton answer to make it sound like she was wholly callous about the deaths of Americans in Benghazi. Her full answer, of course, was that “four Americans are dead,” and “what difference does it make” whether that came after a protest or a planned attack. Still bad!