I don’t think that this analysis is right:

Bowers theorizes: “[E]very single candidate has seen their numbers drop from the time when their candidacy was first announced or first rumored. After the announcement, people learn more about candidates and media criticism grows harsher. That might actually explain Clinton’s rise better than anything else, since she is so well known and opinions on her are so fixed that she had less to fear from the inevitable drop-off. In other words, that people have fixed opinions on her has actually been an asset, rather than a hindrance, to her campaign. … Clinton, by contrast, is a rock who has been through the meat grinder several times in the past. Things were not going to get worse for her, but they were going to get worse for everyone else.”

First of all, Hillary has never been through a meat grinder. At worst, she’s been scraped over a dull cheese grater, relative to what could have been done had the press been doing its job in the nineties. Also, her opponents aren’t going to bring up her sordid past, because as Democrats they were complicit throughout in covering it up, and completely accepted the corruption of the Clintons as the price for political power (the straw that broke the back of my support for Democrats for my lifetime, or at least until a new generation comes along that renounces the behavior of their forebears). And the Republicans and other foes of a Hillary candidacy (like me) are going to keep their powder dry until she is actually nominated, and lay down the most withering fire in the campaign, not over a year before the election.

One other point. Even if she had “been through a meat grinder,” that was then, and this is now, and there are a whole lot of voters who are unaware of the events of over a decade ago, because they were young and not paying much attention, or paying attention to only the salacious aspects, not the criminality and corruption. Now that young people get so much more information from the Internet, and the traditional media gatekeepers who protected the Clintons in the nineties have lost so much of their power, I suspect that we are going to be reintroduced to both of the real Clintons in the coming year, via people like the “Slick Grope Vets for Truth.”