Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on Sunday that being a woman makes her a political outsider, as polls indicated that Americans in the 2016 election cycle were holding favorable opinions about candidates with outsider status.

"In politics this year, it looks like everyone wants an outsider. Now that puts you in a fix," CBS host John Dickerson told Clinton during an interview on "Face the Nation".

"I cannot imagine anyone would be more of an outsider than the first woman president," Clinton said.

"All of these mothers and fathers bring me the place mats with all the presidents, and they bring their daughters, and they say, my daughter has a question for you," she said. "And then the daughter says, 'how come there are no girls on this place mat?' So, I think that is a pretty big, unconventional choice."

When reminded by Dickerson that when it came to voters' definition of an "outsider", it means candidates with no records of holding public office, Clinton cast doubts on such candidates' qualification as president.

"Do we want people who have never been elected to anything, who have no political experience, who have never made any hard choices in the public arena?" Clinton argued. "Voters are going to have to decide that."

For Clinton, a national figure who had served as the First Lady, the New York senator and the Secretary of State over the past three decades, challenges from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders together with controversy around her private email setup threaten to derail her otherwise smooth path to the party's nomination.

Once regarded as an underdog, Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist and widely perceived by many as a "Washington outsider", has in recent weeks surged in poll numbers with his campaign mainly targeting income inequality.

Meanwhile, while most Republican candidates had struggled this summer with anemic poll numbers standing at single digit, those who had never held political office were faring well.

In the 16-membered Republican field, New York billionaire developer Donald Trump, former CEO of computing giant Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson had so far garnered over 50 percent of Republican voters' support, said the latest CNN poll released on Sunday. Endit

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