My personal preference is he beat Clinton and then McCain beats him easily
However, if Clinton beats Obama badly in Pennsylvania, it is still up for grabs between the two of them.
I admit to becoming more biased against Obama.
"Let's break it down," he said. "Obviously in the Southwest, [McCain's] going to make us much stronger. [..] Frankly, while some people have problems with his stand on immigration, he probably keeps Hispanics in play [..]. He really helps us in the Northeast and upper Midwest [..]. Then, anywhere where there's a veterans population or military bases. [..] That's a huge advantage for us. Florida, big military presence [etc].
).
Sure hope so!
The Gallup/ Rasmussen disparity concerns me though.
Obama Support Among "Bitter" Voters Unchanged
No decline in support among low-income, low-education, religious Democrats
Gallup
April 16, 2008
As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton prepare for Wednesday night's debate in Philadelphia, Gallup's daily tracking indicates that Obama's support has yet to suffer following his widely reported remarks about small-town voters being "bitter." The remarks were first reported on April 11.
Obama said in essence that small-town voters are bitter because the government has not been able to help their economic plight. As a result, they "cling" to religion and drift toward narrow issues such as gun rights, and anti-trade or anti-immigration policies, instead of their larger economic interests.
Clinton has criticized Obama's comments on the campaign trail in recent days and is sure to remind Pennsylvania voters of those remarks in the debate Wednesday night.
Clinton and other Obama critics have characterized his remarks as being insensitive to less-well-educated, lower-income, and religious voters. If his comments are to affect any voters, presumably it would be voters in these subgroups. But an in-depth analysis of Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected both before and after the controversy shows little or no change in support for Obama as the Democratic nominee among these types of Democratic voters.
The analysis is based on tracking data of Democratic voters' nomination preferences immediately before (April 8-10) and immediately after (April 12-14) Obama's remarks became a major campaign issue. Although Gallup's tracking data do not have a variable that identifies small-town residents per se, it can identify a number of groups that have suffered economically and are presumably the types of voters to whom Obama was referring.
Income
Democratic voters at the lower end of the economic spectrum have disproportionately backed Clinton for the nomination, but her standing among these voters has not changed since Obama's remarks. Obama's support among voters making $24,000 or less a year has shown a slight, but not statistically significant, drop of three percentage points in recent days.
Education
Last week, Gallup reported on the "education gap" in voting in the Democratic primary race, with Obama running strongly among those with a college degree or postgraduate education, and Clinton doing better among those with less formal education. Obama's remarks may have offended voters who did not attend college, but if they did, it has not materially affected his support among this group, which dropped just one point since the controversy began. Because Clinton's support among those with a high school education or less also dipped slightly, the relative positioning of the candidates among this group has not changed.
Financial Concerns
Education and income are essentially surrogates for lower socioeconomic status, and that may not necessarily indicate economic distress. The Gallup tracking poll can help address the issue directly because it asks voters if they worry about money. Though Clinton tends to appeal to voters with less education and income, Obama runs better among Democratic voters who say they are worried about money. That could be because blacks, who overwhelmingly support Obama, are more likely to worry about money.
Obama led by 15 points among Democratic voters who said they were worried about money before his remarks were publicized, and has essentially the same lead (14 points) since then.
Religion
Obama hypothesized that many of the voters he was talking about "cling" to religion because of their frustration with their economic state. But there is no evidence that more religious Democratic voters have shifted their support away from Obama as a result of his statement. Prior to the controversy, 49% of Democrats who say religion is an important part of their lives supported Obama and 42% preferred Clinton. Obama maintains a similar five-point lead among religious Democrats in the more recent data.
Black Versus White Democrats
The above analysis looks at subgroups among the Democratic electorate as a whole. But since whites are more likely than blacks to live in small towns, Obama probably had white voters in mind when he made his remarks. Polling has established that Obama receives overwhelming support among blacks, so it is possible he has lost support among lower-educated white Democrats in recent days but offset the losses with gains among lower-educated black Democrats, for example. But an analysis of the relationships reported in this review among white Democrats only finds no evidence that whites have reacted to the controversy in a different way than blacks.
Implications
It certainly appears that, as of April 14 interviewing, Obama's remarks have not hurt him -- either among the Democratic electorate as a whole or among the Democratic constituencies Obama was referring to. Wednesday night's debate may shine a spotlight on those comments and make them known to a wider audience, so the possibility remains that Obama has not completely weathered the storm.
Conceivably, Obama could be hurt more in a general-election context, where voters with the characteristics he describes might already have an inkling to vote Republican, and such remarks could nudge them more in that direction. But Gallup's general-election tracking data -- like that for the Democratic nomination -- have so far shown no deterioration in Obama's standing versus presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.
Survey Methods
Results are based on aggregated data from Gallup's daily tracking data, consisting of telephone interviews with 1,210 Democratic voters, aged 18 and older, conducted April 8-10, 2008, and 1,314 Democratic voters, aged 18 and older, conducted April 12-14, 2008. For results based on these samples of Democratic voters, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.
Margins of error for subgroups will be higher.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only). [..]
N.B. Note of caution to fellow Obama supporters
Notice how Obama's numbers all fall within a fairly narrow range: 37-45% (and if you discount the always dodgy ARG, 40-45%).
Hillary's numbers on the other hand are all over the place: 42-57%.
That's possible because of another correlation: the less undecideds a poll has, the higher Hillary's numbers. Or: the pollsters who push their respondents more for an answer, see the undecideds turn to Hillary.
Also with the Bradley effect in mind (some people wont tell pollsters they are going to vote against the black candidate), take into consideration that most undecideds might turn out to be Hillary voters.
Another way to reduce the noise in Hill's numbers is to discount both the ARG and PPP polls - the two outliers in the sequence. Then Hillary's range is down to a five-point spread too: 49-54%, and Obama's at 40-44%. I.e., a Hillary win by close to 10 points?
MYSTERY POLLSTER: Follow The Undecided
Mark Blumenthal
Thursday, April 17, 2008
As with several other states in recent months, Pennsylvania's primary race is producing some unusually divergent polling results. In just the last week we have seen surveys showing Hillary Rodham Clinton leading by 20, Barack Obama up by 3 and everything in between. But for all of the variation in both the results and the methodologies used by the pollsters that reported them, one statistic has been relatively constant. As noted two weeks ago by my colleague Amy Walter, Obama's percentage of the vote has been less variable, typically falling somewhere between 40 percent and 45 percent.
The best way to consider a big mass of data, as my first statistics professor used to say, is to draw a picture. So consider the chart below, which plots the results of each Pennsylvania poll fielded since the March 18 speech by Obama on race and the Jeremiah Wright controversy. The darker blue points represent polls fielded all or in part over the last week, since news broke about Obama's controversial remarks at a California fundraising event.
The wide spread in the cloud of points illustrates the key issue, also noted this morning by NBC's Chuck Todd: Obama's range is more consistent (between 37 percent and 45 percent), "while Clinton's number is all over the map" (between 40 percent and 57 percent).
Dots plotted near the lower left corner of the chart have a bigger undecided number, while those closer to the upper right have a smaller number of undecideds. So as the undecided percentage gets lower, Clinton's support gets higher.
It is worth noting that there are many differences in the methods used by the pollsters active in Pennsylvania. Some use live interviewers, others use an automated "interactive voice response" (IVR) method. Some interview for as long as four to five days with repeated attempts to contact unavailable respondents, while others complete as many interviews as they can in one night with no "callbacks." Some sample randomly generated telephone numbers, others sample from lists of registered votes. And of course, the "likely voter" screens vary. As a result of all of these factors, the demographic and geographic compositions of the various poll samples may differ in ways that are not obvious from the horse race results.
But if we can set those concerns aside for a moment, we ought to consider why the "undecided" result varies as much as it does among pollsters, and why Clinton's support in Pennsylvania appears to riseas the undecided percentage falls.
The large variation in undecideds is not unusual. Ultimately, the size of the undecided category can depend on how hard the pollster "pushes" uncertain voters for a decision: Does the question offer respondents "undecided" as an option? Does it include a follow-up probe asking uncertain respondents how they lean? Are interviewers trained to push for a decision -- repeating the candidate choices as necessary -- or do they immediately take "I'm not sure" as an answer? Does the automated question pause a few seconds before offering "undecided" as a choice? All of these mechanics can help push respondents harder for an answer.
And what does it mean that undecided respondents seem to gravitate to one candidate when pushed?
The most likely explanation is that uncertain voters consider Clinton a safer choice and tend to opt for her rather than Obama when pushed. Obama has long been perceived by Democrats as the candidate best able to bring change to Washington, but Democrats also agree that Clinton has more experience. The combination of the Wright and "bitter" controversies surrounding Obama may be giving some voters pause, and the strategy of the Clinton campaign appears directed at maximizing that sense of uncertainty. This pattern creates the possibility that the bulk of the remaining undecided voters may "break" to Clinton between now and primary day.
One complication here is that the most extreme results on the chart above come from just four pollsters: SurveyUSA, which typically reports a very small undecided number and a bigger-than-average Clinton lead; Public Policy Polling, which typically reports a double-digit undecided number and better-than-average results for Obama; and the American Research Group and InsiderAdvantage, which manage to contribute results at both extremes. All except American Research Group use an automated methodology.
Remove those four pollsters from the chart and the "all over the place" spread in the Clinton percentage largely disappears. On the seven remaining polls in which 6 percent to 8 percent are undecided, Clinton leads Obama by an average of 50 percent to 41 percent; on the 10 remaining polls with an undecided of 9 percent to 18 percent, Clinton leads by an average 47 percent to 41 percent. So the wide variation in the Clinton's percentage is probably about more than than just how hard the pollsters push respondents for a choice.
Some may also be tempted to speculate about the so-called Bradley-Wilder effect, in which polls in the 1980s and early 1990s tended to underestimate support for white candidates with black opponents. The theory was that the fear of "social discomfort" made some respondents withhold their true preference if they thought it would create tension in the interview. But the contradictory evidence here is that polls conducted with an IVR methodology -- which has no live interviewer -- are contributing responses at both ends of the chart above.
