Hillary’s Wrong Numbers: Obama Polls Up, Clinton Funds Down
To anyone tracking delegates, it’s been clear for more than a month that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is in mortal danger. But as long as she was battling Barack Obama at the polls every week, she could hope to control the narrative of the Democratic race, even if she was losing individual contests. And so her campaign kept sprouting new raisons d’être: the wisdom of superdelegates, the enfranchisement of Florida and Michigan, her supposed ability to carry big states.
No more. We’re now halfway through the six weeks between Mississippi and Pennsylvania, and this long interlude has washed away Clinton’s spin. Now her campaign is not only over. It’s obviously over.
For all the drama of the Democratic campaign, both candidates bobbed around in a very narrow range of support for most of February and March. But that’s changing right now. In four of the past five days, Obama has gone over 50 percent in Gallup’s tracking poll and has opened a lead over Clinton averaging seven points. This is the first time either candidate has moved significantly beyond the fluctuations inherent in daily surveys, and it’s the longest stretch one of them has spent as the leader since late February. Obama is breaking out in a meaningful way.
Maybe Democrats liked what they heard in Obama’s speech about Jeremiah Wright. Perhaps all the talk about Hillary's (not) quitting is cementing his status as front-runner. Bill Richardson and other superdelegates lining up for Obama could be having an impact. But one thing is clear: Clinton’s strategy of exploiting racial polarization among Democrats has failed miserably.
Wright cost Obama. From the first week in March (when the Wright controversy first broke) to the third, his positive rating held steady at a rather incredible 82 percent among black voters, but dropped from 47 percent to 42 percent among whites, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal polls. But Wright’s wake cut Clinton even worse: During that same period, she fell twelve points among African-Americans, from 63 percent to 51 percent, and dropped five points among white voters, too, from 39 percent to a Bush-like 34 percent. Clinton now performs particularly horribly across the upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, where white Democrats trend progressive and like Obama. In Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin, she now trails John McCain while Obama leads him, and she is doing markedly poorer in Connecticut and Virginia, too.
As Clinton surrogates pop up once every few days to reinject race into the campaign, they’ve been trying to corral the last bloc where Hillary might run up her popular-vote totals, even more than ethnic Democrats in Pennsylvania: Scotch-Irish Appalachians in North Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The campaign thinks of this demographic as Fox News Democrats — which is why Hillary supporters such as Ed Rendell keep showing up on, and sucking up to, Fox — while social scientists would call them “low-information.” (Twenty-three percent of white Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama believe he is a Muslim.) It must have been tempting for the Clintons, formerly of Arkansas, to believe Hillary could win over these voters fairly painlessly. Instead, Clinton had farther to fall among blacks than she realized and is also cratering with whites nationwide.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/04/hillarys_wrong_numbers_obama_p.html
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