Clinton thread
Out of context: Reply #195
- Started
- Last post
- 442 Responses
- ********0
"As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it's not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37% positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.
The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday this week by Hart-McInturff and surveyed 700 registered voters, which gives the poll a margin of error of +/- 3.7%. In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race and overall response to last week's Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.
On that issue specifically, 32% of folks said he "sufficiently addressed the issue," while 26% of those folks believe he needs to address the Wright controversy further; 31% of voters surveyed did not see the speech or had no opinion. Interestingly, of those voters who said they saw the speech, 47% said Obama sufficiently addressed the Wright issue while 37% said he needs to address it further. Among whites, 45% were satisfied with Obama's explanation, 38% were not; Among blacks, 67% said the speech was sufficient while 25% want him to address it further.
A couple of thoughts:
It doesn't appear that Obama has taken a substantial hit on the Wright issue, and most seemed to be satisfied with his reponse.
Beating McCain (if by a small margin) is great news.
Here is the previous Poll.
But after more than 40 nominating contests, that party is still undecided about the candidate it will place on the top of the ticket — Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama. In the poll, Clinton has a four-point national lead over Obama, 47 percent to 43 percent.Compare that to now:
In the head-to-head matchups, there weren't huge shifts in the numbers with Obama and Clinton dead even at 45% in the national Democratic primary matchup (a slight increase for Obama from early March). In the general-election matchups, Obama led McCain by 2 points and McCain led Clinton by 2 points; all margin of error results and nothing to get too excited over.
So Obama picks up 2 points while Clinton loses 2. Could just be statistical noise of course. But overall, good news for Obama.
Update: Only tangentially related, but we have another superdelegate wavering.
Yesterday it was Maria Cantwell. Today it’s Ron Sims, King County Executive and committed Clinton superdelegate, who was on KUOW’s Weekday this morning telling host Steve Scher that he is, at the very least, unhappy with the destructive potential of the Democratic nomination contest. He also said he’s listening very closely to the debate among superdelegates about how they should get Obama and Clinton to, in his words, "Stop it."
The discussion starts at 49:50, and I’ve transcribed it below. There’s quite a bit of rambling and hedging, but the take-away, for me, is that Sims may be open to the idea of using his superdelegate power to help end the contest before it harms the party’s chances in November (although, classic Sims, he also seemed to suggest he’d be fine with the Democratic nominee not being decided until the convention in late August).
Bottom line: He’s wavering."