Over the past half-century, the role of the First Spouse has become more important to American politics. Past First Ladies have been advocates of domestic issues, served as hosts to foreign dignitaries and their families and, most recently in the case of Hillary Clinton, served as public policy advocates. Not simply silent and invisible supporters of the president, they are a part of the presidential package voters elect.

While the public doesn’t seem to believe the spouses of presidents have a great deal of power, they do believe their influence on the presidency is significant (see Figure 3). Approximately 74 percent of all respondents to the Gallup poll said presidential spouses have either “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of influence. This was true regardless of whether the respondents identified themselves as Republicans or Democrats.

With reference specifically to Bill Clinton as a First Gentleman, large majorities of Americans, especially Democrats, believed he would have at least as much influence as First Ladies have had in the past (see Figure 4). Seventy-four percent of all respondents, 66 percent of Republicans, and 83 percent of Democrats said Bill Clinton would have “about the same” amount or “more influence” than previous presidential spouses.

What’s more, there was a consensus among Democrats (86 percent) that Bill would be helpful to Hillary Clinton if she were elected president (Figure 5); Republicans, however, were almost evenly split on whether he would help her (52 percent) or hurt her (48 percent). (One cannot help but notice that Republicans were more likely than Democrats—by about seventeen percentage points—to believe Bill Clinton would have “less influence” than previous presidential spouses. Could it be that Republicans hope Hillary Clinton will keep the former president “bound and gagged?” Or perhaps they believe Bill Clinton’s influence is outdated. Maybe some Republicans' negative views of Bill Clinton are translated into bias toward anything associated with him or status. Regardless, it is puzzling why a third of Republican respondents believed a former elected president, Democrat or otherwise, would have less influence than previous First Ladies.)

The survey questions so far have assessed only whether Bill Clinton’s influence as a possible First Gentleman is helpful to Hillary’s standalone image. Although the Gallup study asked only about a few Democratic political figures, the data serve as a baseline indication of the extent to which perceptions of Bill Clinton’s influence may extend to greater or lesser optimism about Hillary Clinton in different contexts. To examine such a question, I ran a set of basic logistic regression analyses. The analyses predicted optimism toward Hillary Clinton—that is, whether respondents thought she had a higher chance of winning—using a set of demographic control variables—age, sex, party identification, political ideology, race, region, education, and the sex of the interviewer—and two variables related to the influence of Bill Clinton—helpful or not, and amount of influence. Table 1 shows the results from the analyses.

The cell values in Table 1 are adjusted odds ratios (ORs). ORs greater than one and ORs less than one indicate a positive or negative relationship, respectively, between the variable in the row and the type of optimism toward Clinton shown at the top of each column. Optimism toward a Hillary Clinton presidency free of association with other candidates is significantly related to beliefs about the value of Bill Clinton as a First Gentleman. After controlling for the demographic variables, we find that those who believe Bill Clinton will help Hillary Clinton’s presidency and those who believe he will have more influence are more likely to think Hillary has a positive chance of winning.

Some of this influence extends to Hillary Clinton when she is placed alongside both Barack Obama and John Edwards. As the second column of Table 1 shows, those who believe Bill Clinton will be helpful to Hillary are significantly more likely to believe she has a greater chance of winning than Obama. The third column shows that the more influence one believes Bill Clinton will have over the decisions Hillary Clinton makes, the more likely one believes she has a better chance of winning than John Edwards. As for comparisons to Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s influence is close to null; the public’s optimism towards Hillary relative to Gore is so great (see Figure 2) that positive perceptions of Bill Clinton as a First Gentleman matter very little.

The conclusion we can draw from these multivariate analyses is that perceptions of Bill Clinton as a First Gentleman appear to boost optimism towards Hillary as a standalone candidate, but they matter much less when Hillary Clinton is considered relative to other Democratic candidates.