Polls

Although Senator Barack Obama has been maintaining a small, single-digit lead in national polls, there are signs from a number of recent studies that an Obamavalanche could bury John McCain in November.

Perhaps most encouragingly, a recent Pew study shows that support for John McCain is soft, with just 14% supporting the GOP Senator strongly, compared to 28% for Barack Obama.

The same study shows that the number of Hillary Clinton supporters who say they'll vote for McCain has shrunk to 17%. Interestingly, the number of voters who mistakenly think John McCain is pro-choice is also 17%. 56% of women don't know McCain's position on abortion. Additionally, according to Gallup, Obama has pulled even with McCain among voters with less formal education.

At least he's in double digits. Rasmussen is out with a poll that finds just 9% -- NINE percent! -- of voters think Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Not surprisingly, a number that low is unprecedented. It's the first time that rating has fallen to single digits since Rasmussen started polling.

Congress hasn't received higher than a 15% approval rating all year. Here's the breakdown by party:

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

But wait, there's more. Independent voters, those not party affiliated, are especially unimpressed with our representatives on Capitol Hill. Only 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings.

What's the source of the cynicism?

Most voters (72%) think most members of Congress are more interested in furthering their own political careers. Just 14% believe members are genuinely interested in helping people.

Hmmm. Hard to argue with that kind of logic.

The Associated Press, with Yahoo News, asked a sampling of 1,752 people what word or trait came to mind when they thought of the presidential candidates. Here are the results:

John McCain:

1. Old, 19 percent

2. Military service, 9 percent

3. Record, qualifications, 8 percent

4. Bush, 7 percent

5. Strength, 7 percent

6. Insider, politician, 7 percent

7. Iraq, terrorism, 6 percent

8. Honest, 5 percent

9. Republican, 5 percent

10. (tie) Moral/good and dishonest, 4 percent

Barack Obama:

1. Outsider, change, 20 percent

2. Lack of experience, 13 percent

3. Dishonest, 9 percent

4. Inspiring, 8 percent

5. Liberal, 6 percent

6, 7 (tie). Obama's race, young, 6 percent

8. Not likable, 5 percent

9. Intelligent, 4 percent

10. Muslim, 3 percent

The way I add it up, the negatives are close to the same for both with McCain 35% and Obama 33%. Your results may vary.

Gallup shows that Barack Obama's expected bump in the polls since Hillary Clinton dropped out comes mostly from women. In a seven point jump, Obama now leads John McCain by 13 points (51 to 38 percent) among female voters.

The Times suggests that while many Democratic women would have preferred Hillary, they're now realizing that when it comes to certain women's issues, Obama's views are closer to theirs than McCain's:

As the poll came out, a group of women who supported Mrs. Clinton held a conference call to begin a campaign to "sound the alarm" about Mr. McCain's record on women's issues as he tries to woo women voters himself.

The women –including Ellen Malcolm, the president of Emily's List, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida - said some people think Mr. McCain is moderate on women's issues because he has occasionally been a maverick in the past but he is in fact quite conservative, especially on abortion rights. Mr. McCain favors overturning Roe v. Wade and voted against a bill to make it easier for women to file lawsuits seeking equal pay for equal work.

Of course, a group like that is only going to appeal to younger and/or more left-leaning urban Dems. It's the older, more blue-collar women that Obama desperately needs, and they're the ones most suspicious of him. And obviously that's exactly the group McCain will be trying to woo.

Tip to the Washington Post:

In Summary:

• McCain can compete in the west because of his stance on immigration with Latino's
• McCain wins Appalachia because poor white voters can't stand Obama.
• McCain is historically strong in the upper Midwest states of Wisconsin and Michigan.
• McCain doesn't need as much money as Obama to run his ops.

Sounds good, but points number one and two would seem to be mutually exclusive, as much of the opposition to McCain's immigration came from exactly those same poor whites that McCain claims as supporters in Kentucky, West Virginia, etc.

The McCain advisor Davis also claims that McCain outperforms general election polls, which is a good thing because he's off to a very bad start in the general tracking polls. In fact it seems that the rift in the Democratic party caused by Hillary is disappearing fast. Obama has moved up five points since June 4th while McCain is down a point, according to Rasmussen.

State by state polls are more important of course, but the general election matchups do indicate that McCain has work to do, but there is reason for optimism in the McCain camp.

Polling is a dubious business at best. There are so many surveys out there that anybody on any side of any issue can find one to buttress an argument or build up a candidate. But I thought this Gallup roundup was interesting, considering it comes just before the big bang of the '08 general election (it's a tally of findings from the month of May). Basically it shows that in the minds of the electorate, Barack Obama and John McCain are completely deadlocked across the board. If you break it down across voters' income or age or race or where they live, the candidates come out tied.

Take education for example:

Highly educated voters were another key group helping to propel Obama to the Democratic nomination. The two candidates run about evenly among all education groups except those with postgraduate educations, among whom Obama currently leads by a significant margin. It is notable that McCain runs competitively with Obama among voters with a high-school education or less, which is normally a solid Democratic group. Obama offsets that by running evenly with McCain in a usually strong Republican group -- voters with a four-year degree but no postgraduate education.

For the most part the findings support the usual Republican-Democratic divides that we've come to expect but the stirring thing is just how close that gap is.

Check out the numbers here.

If Hillary is imploding, nobody told the good folks in West (By God!) Virginia and Kentucky. She's still showing huge margins of support.

RealClearPolitics has the roundup:

Suffolk is out with a new poll in West Virginia (May 10-11) showing Clinton with a 36-point lead:

Clinton 60
Obama 24
Undecided 8

And Research 2000 has new numbers in Kentucky (May 7-9), where Clinton also enjoys a substantial 27-point lead over Obama:

Clinton 58
Obama 31
Undecided 11

Even with results like this, we probably won't see another shift in the race back to Hillary. These results are "baked in," they are expected, and in fact anything less than a 20 point margin may be looked on as a Hillary loss. Apart from some handwringing over Obama's lack of appeal to Appalachian voters, the Democrats will remind themselves that most Americans aren't from the hills and hollers, and that will be that.

And Kentucky and West Virginia will go red in the fall. The Democrats will just have to win without them, if they can.

Rasmussen Reports, the widely respected polling organization, has decided it has seen enough. From the company's Web site:

...while Senator Clinton has remained close and competitive in every meaningful measure, she is a close second and the race is over. It has become clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee.

At the moment, Senator Clinton's team is busily trying to convince Superdelegates and pundits that she is more electable than Barack Obama. For reasons discussed in a separate article, it doesn't matter. Even if every single Superdelegate was convinced that the former First Lady is somewhat more electable than Obama, that is not enough of a reason to deny him the nomination.

With this in mind, Rasmussen Reports will end our daily tracking poll of the Democratic race and focus exclusively on the general election competition between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

What can you say? When polling firms join the chorus and decide there's nothing more to say about this race, you'd think that reality would have to start sinking in with one HRC. All that's really left for her now is to further divide and damage the party. It's her choice, I guess.

The Associated Press is reporting that, according to an AP/Yahoo! Poll, Barack Obama's support among white non-college graduates has fallen sharply over the course of this campaign:

In an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll in April, 53 percent of whites who have not completed college viewed Obama unfavorably, up a dozen percentage points from November. During that period, the numbers (of yahoos) viewing Clinton and Republican candidate John McCain negatively have stayed about even.

Pennsylvania also illustrated the problems racial attitudes among less educated whites are causing Obama.

In exit polls, one in five of the state's white voters who haven't completed college said race was an important factor in choosing a candidate, about double the number of white college graduates who said so.

Apparently, at press time, no polling data was available on the all important "bag of rocks" demographic.

The article goes on to cite concerns among uneducated whites that Senator Obama doesn't address their concerns specifically enough. So the problem is they want to see more policy papers? What's going on here?