It’s been a good 10 days for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
She was widely deemed the winner of the first Democratic debate, chased Jim Webb from the race, headed off her biggest primary threat in Vice President Joseph R. Biden and on Thursday defused the Benghazi time bomb with a performance that had few rough spots for the surging Democratic presidential front-runner.
A stormy summer, which saw her poll numbers tumble, has given way to a sunnier autumn, during which she has stopped the slide and begun to regain trust among Democratic voters, posted the best fundraising numbers of anyone in either party and worked behind the scenes to build a formidable campaign operation.
“She and her campaign hit a rough patch for a while, but there’s no denying that since the last debate they’ve got their mojo back,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and director of the communications practice at QGA Public Affairs.
Mrs. Clinton has risen 5 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics.com average of national polls of Democratic primary voters in the last 10 days, and is nearing the 50 percent mark yet again. Key to her surge has been regaining support that had been flowing to Mr. Biden — a trend that began even as the vice president was still pondering a run.
Staring at those numbers, Mr. Biden announced Wednesday he would pass on the campaign.
Combined with Mr. Webb’s withdrawal from the race Monday, Mrs. Clinton’s pool of challengers has shrunk to a lean field: Sen. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent who won’t even call himself a Democrat; former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley; and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, who won the Statehouse as an independent and before that served in the U.S. Senate as a Republican.
“We feel Hillary Clinton certainly is riding a lot of momentum right now, and we are seeing that energy among our supporters, and we will carry it forward into the weeks to come,” Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said.
Analysts said Mr. Biden’s decision to forgo a run was an indication that he evaluated his chances and deemed Mrs. Clinton unbeatable.
“Clinton, now more than ever,” Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, wrote in their latest campaign tip sheet Thursday morning ahead of her Benghazi panel testimony. “The decision by Vice President Joe Biden to pass on the presidential race confirms what would have been true even if he had entered the contest: This is Hillary Clinton’s race to lose.”
He said Mrs. Clinton started with built-in advantages within the Democrats’ primary system, where superdelegates to the nominating convention are not bound by the way their states vote. Mrs. Clinton starts out with an overwhelming advantage among those superdelegates.
Mrs. Clinton’s supporters were relieved Thursday evening after the gavel came down at the end of an 11-hour hearing held by the special congressional committee probing the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
In a similar hearing in 2013, Mrs. Clinton seemed to mock the inquiry, uttering the infamous line: “What difference at this point does it make?”
On Thursday she was in control, politely but dismissively smiling at prodding questions and nodding at the defense mounted by Democrats on the committee, who have made feverish efforts over the past two weeks to dent the committee’s credibility, accusing it of being a political charade and a waste of money.
“I came here because I said I would. And I’ve done everything I know to do, as have the people with whom I worked, to try to answer your questions. I cannot do anymore than that,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Mr. Manley said the hearing won’t stop Republicans from raising questions “but this should go a long way to putting it behind her.”
The Benghazi hearing was the one major date on Mrs. Clinton’s calendar between the summer and the first votes of the primary season, in Iowa, in February.
There will still be releases at the end of October, November, December and January of thousands of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server.
Those will likely produce more questions about her use of her own server and what classified information she was sharing across a nonsecured system.
Mrs. Clinton attempted to undercut those questions Thursday, saying email was not a particularly prominent part of her job as secretary. She said she didn’t even have a computer on her desk at the State Department.
“I did not conduct most of the business that I did on behalf of our country on email,” she said.
• S.A. Miller contributed to this article.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.