Reuters, Wasington :Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s support among Democrats has dropped to its lowest point since Reuters/Ipsos began polling on her chances of winning the party’s nomination for the 2016 election almost three years ago. But the former secretary of state still has a lead of more than 20 percentage points over her nearest rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the online survey showed on Friday.Clinton has suffered a steady erosion in the number of people in opinion polls who see her as trustworthy ascontroversy has grown over her use of a private email account when she served as America’s top diplomat.The Reuters/Ipsos survey, a rolling poll taken over the previous five days, put Clinton at 45 percent, with Sanders at 25 percent.The lead is Clinton’s smallest since Reuters/Ipsos began polling Democrats in late 2012 about who they want to see representing them at the November 2016 presidential election. Vice President Joe Biden, who is considering whether to challenge Clinton for the nomination, came in third at 16 percent. Biden was polling at around 10 percent a month ago.AP adds In ways both subtle and blunt, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign is sending a message to Vice President Joe Biden about his potential presidential campaign: This won’t be easy.While Clinton and her team speak warmly of Biden in public, they have taken steps to make clear how they’ve taken control of the party’s establishment in hopes of discouraging the vice president from entering the race.The latest came Friday in the most public of settings: the Democratic National Committee summer meetings. In a speech to the party’s most committed activists, Clinton cast herself as its standard-bearer and vowed to win the presidential race and rebuild the party from the ground up.”We are building something that will last long after next November,” Clinton told party officials gathered in a Minneapolis ballroom. “Other candidates may be fighting for a particular ideology, but I’m fighting for you and your families.”The speech came after her team rolled out a string of high-profile endorsements in early-voting states and scheduled an onslaught of fundraisers across the country in the effort to ice a Biden bid before he even gets started.Behind the scenes, they’re pressuring donors and delegates to pledge their loyalty to Clinton. Her team sent a slate of top aides to the meeting this weekend armed with pledge cards asking party delegates to commit to Clinton.Donors who have publicly expressed support for a Biden run have later been contacted by the Clinton team, according to fundraisers and Democratic strategists who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations. Even Clinton herself has made a few calls, they said, to express her disappointment in the defector.Clinton said the over-arching strategy was based on the lessons she learned from her last run, attributing her 2008 primary loss to a failure to capture enough backing from the party’s important super delegates – the party and elected officials who are empowered to select the presidential nominee at the Democratic national convention, regardless of what happens in the 2016 primaries.
