Stacy McCain hears a thud in the latest Gallup poll but he doesn’t know the half of it.
Today’s ABC News/Washington Post survey of adults, which was taken 6/12-15, shows Obama leading McCain 48-42% — down from Obama’s 7% lead one month ago. Meanwhile, a new Cook Political Report/RT Strategies poll of RVs, also taken 6/12-15, shows Obama leading McCain 44-40%. Similarly, the latest Gallup tracking poll, which queried RVs between 6/13-15, shows Obama with a 4% lead, 46-42%.
A fourth poll of the battlegrounds commissioned by NARAL shows Maverick down just two points. What gives? Obama claims it’s due to McCain having been given a free ride by the media while he was finishing off Hillary but Jonathan Martin swats that aside. I wonder if the answer doesn’t lie in this detail:
Obama still has some work to do to unite the Democratic Party. Almost nine in 10 Republicans now support McCain, while not quite eight in 10 Democrats said they support Obama. Nearly a quarter of those who said they favored Clinton over Obama for the nomination currently prefer McCain for the general election, virtually unchanged from polls taken before Clinton suspended her campaign.
There are many more Democrats than Republicans right now and more of them have yet to come home to Barry O. Once they do, he’ll presumably bump up to a double-digit lead. Is that the answer? Or is Hopenchange simply not quite the juggernaut among the public that it is at, say, MSNBC? I want to believe the public’s made a considered judgment and found, like Karl, that “Obama’s record, judgment and message are at best entirely undistinguished in the field of presidential politics,” but I actually believe they’re simply not paying much attention yet.
