Quinnipiac: Obamamentum in PA stopped

Quinnipiac’s latest poll shows that Barack Obama has stopped gaining ground in Pennsylvania, and Hillary Clinton may have begun rolling back his support in key areas of Philadelphia. The results are not as dramatic as the ARG poll released yesterday showing Hillary up 20 in the next primary state, but it shows a trend that will encourage Hillary to continue to press the “bitter” comments as an issue. The big winner of this poll may be John McCain, though:

Advertisement

The first fresh and reliable look at the mood of Pennsylvania voters since the controversy over Barack Obama’s comments about the bitterness of working-class voters flared up over the weekend has arrived: Hillary Clinton holds a steady 6 percentage-point advantage over Obama in a critical state holding its primary one week from today.

Clinton is the choice of 50 percent of the Pennsylvania Democrats surveyed and Obama 44 percent, according to the results of a new Quinnipiac University Poll. The pollsters, who surveyed Pennsylvanians on Saturday and Sunday, conclude that Clinton has “stalled… Obama’s drive’’ in Pennsylvania – with the two candidates’ standing unchanged from the last Quinnipiac Poll released on April 8 – Obama then had been closing a gap with Clinton in earlier surveys taken there. …

“She even gained back some ground in the Philadelphia suburbs – the area where elections are won and lost in the Keystone State,” Richards said in a release this morning. “She now trails Obama by just two points in this critical area, while she was 11 points behind a week ago.”

The “first fresh and reliable” appellation is a dig at ARG. Quinnipiac has a better reputation than ARG and better predictive success. However, one glaring error occurs at the end of the report, in which Quinnipiac asserts that Obama wins black voters “by a margin of 96-8”, which would be a neat trick. Either they only sampled 104 black voters out of an overall sample of over 2,000, which would be a terrible undersampling, or someone at Quinnipiac has a problem with math.

Advertisement

More interesting is the McCain Democrat phenomenon. He continues to run a strong third in the Democratic primaries, in an odd manner. Twenty-six percent of Hillary backers will vote for McCain over Obama, and 19% of Obama voters will vote for McCain over Hillary in the general election. Anything close to that kind of crossover vote would allow McCain to easily take Pennsylvania — a state carried by John Kerry in 2004 — and make it almost impossible for the Democrats to win the White House.

I wonder how many delegates McCain might get at the Democratic convention? (via Memeorandum)

Update (AP): She’s holding on to a 14-point lead per Survey USA and a nine-point lead per Rasmussen — a four-point gain in just one week.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement