Bill Clinton was once the Democratic Party’s most popular politician, a slyly charismatic and pragmatic centrist whose “third way” politics countered the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s and ‘90s. His 1992 victory over President George H.W. Bush stunned a popular incumbent and ended a quarter century of Republican dominance in US politics. Clinton’s warm, oozy charisma—paired with dashing good luck and mean saxophone on the campaign trail—helped him cruise to reelection in 1996. Supporters found his controversies and moral missteps breezily excusable. During his 1998 impeachment trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, his approval ratings jumped to 73% as the public rallied around him. Clinton’s pull was such that Al Gore’s decision to keep him at arm’s length in 2000 is still widely seen as a consequential misstep, one that helped clear George W. Bush’s path to the presidency.
The shine has all but worn off. Clinton’s approval ratings have dropped from 66% upon leaving office to 48% in 2025, as the public re-examines what his presidency meant and what it cost. This month, nine Democrats joined House Republicans on the Oversight Committee to advance contempt resolutions against both Hillary Clinton and her husband over subpoenas tied to the committee’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Though the pair finally capitulated to the committee’s demands and agreed to testify, the damage to the Clinton political dynasty has already been dealt.
Democrats began to turn on the Clintons after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump. After the loss, Democrats blamed Hillary Clinton’s ethics controversies and her thin campaign presence in key states. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was pulled back into view as scrutiny of his alleged sexual misconduct intensified, and as party leaders were accused of applying a double standard: publicly condemning Trump’s behavior while ignoring over a dozen women who accused Clinton of similar actions—including a 1999 rape allegation. During the MeToo era, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other Democrats argued that Clinton should have resigned after his impeachment. Lewinsky herself called the affair “a gross abuse of power.” A YouGov poll found that 53% of Hillary Clinton voters believed the accusations lobbed against Bill.
The Epstein connection has proven even thornier. Clinton surfaced prominently in the first batch of Epstein files released last December, including a now-infamous photo that appears to show him in a hot tub on Epstein’s island with Ghislaine Maxwell and an unidentified young woman. The New York Post, a long tabloid antagonist of the Clinton presidency, had the headline “Tubba Bubba” on their next issue. As if Clinton’s luck couldn’t get any worse, emails surfaced from Clinton asking if Epstein had a photo of Trump “blowing Bubba”, propelling Clinton into the realm of social media memeification alongside figures like Nicholas Maduro and Charlie Kirk.
Clinton also drew renewed criticism during the Black Lives Matter era for signing the 1994 crime bill, which expanded incarceration levels and authorised harsher punishments for misdemeanors, like drug offenses. The legislation disproportionately impacted Black and Latinx communities, and has been credited with expanding the school-to-prison pipeline and widening the racial gap in education. By the 2020 election, Clinton became a scapegoat in the race crisis following the murder of George Floyd, and younger African-Americans were polled as having more unfavorable views of the former president. This is a far contrast from Clinton’s days as president, where his cross-racial support was so strong that he was once referred to as the “first Black president.” Joe Biden, a lead supporter of the bill during his time in the Senate, went so far to call it “a mistake” and apologized for the repercussions of the bill on the campaign trail – whereas Clinton said nothing at all. Clinton’s lack of action during the Rwandan genocide compared to his swift NATO bombing of Serbia following evidence of war crimes in Bosnia has been widely cited as a key example of anti-Black biases in foreign aid. The president even apologized in 1998 for not properly recognizing the slaughter of up to 1 million Tutsi Rwandans.
Clinton’s economic policy, the supposed “strength” of his administration, has also come under fire from experts. He did some good – as president he yielded a budget surplus of over $230 billion and the nation greatly enjoyed a technology boom – his actions left some unintended consequences. His signage of the Gramm-Liech-Bliley Act of 1999, among others, deregulated banks as well as housing corporations, opening the door for abuses that caused the Great Recession in 2008. Time Magazine ended up naming him one of 25 people to blame for the crisis in 2009, alongside fellow president George W. Bush and banker Angelo Mozilo. Meanwhile, the North American Free Trade Agreement, later superseded by Trump in 2020, lost up to 800,000 American jobs, and by 2015 about half of the American public said that the negotiation was a mistake and named as one of the worst mistakes of the Clinton presidency.
As Democrats have shifted left since the Obama years, old Clinton-era compromises and scandals—overlooked by Democrats of the time—have become harder to defend. Bubba has shown that for better or for worse, Democrats have stopped making excuses for the public’s growing disillusion with his presidency.
