How serious are Hillionaire's troubles?

Well, no less an NBC luminary than Chuck Todd calls her current numbers "dismal."

Phillip Bump at WaPo says that her current situation substantiates the oft-repeated observation that she's more popular when she's not running for something.

The Hill says that top Freedom-Hater strategists are sweating - one even calling the current situation "the canary in the coal mine."

Among the most alarming findings, from a Democratic perspective, was the indication that Clinton, widely considered the party’s front-runner, would lose Colorado by 9 points to Walker and would lose by at least 6 points to any of the three candidates in Iowa.

Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based Democratic consultant who has worked with Clinton in the past but is not involved with her current campaign, described the findings as “absolutely dangerous” for the party. 

“The electorate is very volatile. They are not happy about anybody [in politics], and this is just another indication of that.”

Some Democrats — and presumably the Clinton camp itself, which declined through a spokesman to comment for this story — will take solace from the fact that the 2016 election is more than 15 months away. They argue that this makes hypothetical match-ups largely meaningless.

“At this time in 2007, John McCain was ahead of everyone,” Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked in former President Clinton’s White House and on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, said of the GOP nominee that cycle.

Some independent experts agree — at least to some extent.

“It’s never good to be trailing in a poll or to have numbers that don’t show you in a particularly good light, but at the same time it’s July 2015,” said Geoffrey Skelley, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “The general election is a political century away.”

But it is not just the head-to-head match-ups where Clinton struggles. Other findings are also poor for her, including on the question of whether voters trust her. Those results seem ominous given that the former first lady has been in the public eye for around a quarter-century, making impressions of her more difficult to change. She has also struggled on questions of honesty before.

The Quinnipiac poll showed Coloradans asserting by an almost 2-1 margin that Clinton was not honest or trustworthy: 62 percent said she was not, whereas only 34 percent she was. The findings were not much better in either Iowa or Virginia. Respondents distrusted Clinton 59 percent to 33 percent in the former, and 55 percent to 39 percent in latter.

DC Whispers says it's hearing mutterings of a certain c-word:

The term “Clinton Collapse” is apparently an increasingly common one these days for those whose job it is to continue insulating their candidate from media scrutiny and try and push Mrs. Clinton across the eventual finish line that is the Democratic Party nomination – no easy task given Clinton herself appears increasingly unstable, politically speaking.

Yikes.

It's important to state for the record that LITD is not imparting any kind of certainty to these observations.  But come on, all you drooling Kool-Aid drinkers, she is not where you assumed she'd be in mid-summer 2015.

I also still assume that Donald Trump will implode, or have his doors blown off by an actual conservative, but, as an academically trained historian, I know how wacky this world can get before it even begins to right itself, so consider nothing about this post to be a ha-ha-there's-no-way-your-successor-to-anointing-as-dictator-of-post-America-can-get-over-the-finish-line gesture.  I'm well aware that it can get even darker for us.

Still, it's a delicious moment for those who cherish liberty and harbor hope.

UPDATE: Andrea Mitchell at MSNBC faces the truth:

MSNBC host and NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell stated that when she spoke to intelligence officials at a security conference, “nobody can give an explanation for why a cabinet secretary would have a private email system other than to thwart inquiries, FOIAs” on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Mitchell said that it’s possible that the impact of Clinton’s emails on her campaign has been underestimated. She continued, “Look, you have two inspectors general, and they are referring to this to the Justice Department. Now, you can try to confuse it, and there’s been a lot of misdirection. There’s been inaccurate reporting significantly, on Thursday night by the New York Times, it’s not a criminal referral, not at this stage. It could become, and it could become nothing. But, what they are suggesting is that there were classified — four out of the 40 randomly selected, had classified information, and it was not information that was later upgraded to be classified. It was information that was classified as ‘secret,’ which is a level of classification, at the time. This gets very confusing. And it can be confused further by statements on all sides. That said, the original sin, if you will, is having a private email system.”

Mitchell added, “I was at a security conference speaking to intelligence officials on all sides, and the attorney general, we’ll talk about that later. But nobody can give an explanation for why a cabinet secretary would have a private email system other than to thwart inquiries, FOIAs, and had someone who spent 20 years fighting off many investigations, many of which were unwarranted and which led nowhere. And so, you understand the defensive crouch that a lot of Clinton people were in. But it still doesn’t explain why, going from the Senate, into a cabinet level position, there was a private email system.”

National Journal Senior Political Columnist Ron Fournier stated, “they can’t brush away the fact that the secretary said, when this first was revealed, that there was no confidential information that was given out. We now know that’s true, she’s parsing it now by saying ‘at this time.’ But we know it happens when the Clintons parse, and it’s happening again.”

Sure to add some wrinkles to that famously furrowed brow.