How Hillary Clinton's struggles are letting the GOP candidates sprint to the right

This is a really interesting article:

None months ago, in New Hampshire, I checked in with some state legislator sources about their read on the Republican field. Nobody imagined that Donald Trump would run for president; plenty of people had been hearing that Mitt Romney would. It was a different world, but one difference defined everything. These legislators, who had just watched Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) buck a conservative trend and get reelected, assumed that Hillary Rodham Clinton would carry New Hampshire. Tom Brady won ball games; the Clintons won the Granite state.

This past week, things had changed – oh, for the Clintons, obviously. From the most plugged-in Republicans to the voters using their lunch hours to see Republican presidential candidates speak, no one was scared of Clinton. Multiple voters, from Hooksett to Berlin, asked me if Clinton would actually stay in the race. And that new attitude has a lot to do with the rise of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and the summer swoons of "establishment" candidates.

Democrats should know the feeling. In 2005, right after the defeat of the Kerry-Edwards ticket, beltway wisdom dictated that the party needed a red state governor to win the White House. Nothing else had worked in 28 years. The New Republic profiled then-Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, whose politics "would allow him to attract swaths of economically challenged rural voters in places like Virginia and North Carolina." The New York Times profiled former Virginia governor Mark Warner, whose star was rising because "a lot of pragmatic activists and voters worry that [Hillary] Clinton is simply too divisive a candidate to take back the White House." Even then-Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana made noise about a 2008 run, with one supporter telling the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times — seriously, this was a long time ago) that "it will be difficult, if not impossible, to label him as a classic liberal."

And then? The 2006 elections happened. Democrats took back the House and Senate, winning states like Virginia and Missouri and Montana. Gone, very quickly, was the sense that the party needed to "settle" on an "electable" candidate. The door was blown wide open for Clinton and Barack Obama, who gained strength in 2007, almost in tandem with the tumble of President George W. Bush's approval rating. Warner and Bayh never ran for president. Bredesen never got close. John Edwards, who often polled better in general election match-ups than Clinton or Obama, lost four early contests then quit the race. Even before the "demography is destiny" argument took over, Democrats decided that the conditions were there to elect a truly liberal, inspiring candidate.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/05/how-hillary-clintons-struggles-are-letting-the-gop-sprint-to-the-right/