Just looking over the recent poll soundings, I’m curious what the next two weeks are going to show on a few fronts. The Zogby poll may be an outlier today. But there does seem to be some real evidence now that something is allowing John McCain to draw even with the Democratic candidates in hypothetical national match ups and that Clinton is moving ahead against Obama in nationwide matchups between the two of them.
On top of this there’s a poll out of North Carolina showing a neck and neck race between Obama and Clinton, a state that has been expected to be a strong one for Obama.
It’s hard to draw too many conclusions based on these numbers at this point. These come after a string of days where the major campaign coverage has focused either on Obama’s problems (mainly Wright) or his efforts to deal with those problems. And neither is good news for him in the short run.
But it will be very important to see whether these new polling trends stick over the next couple weeks.
The Clinton strategy is to keep the popular vote and delegate deficits as close as possible while trying to inflict sufficient damage on Obama that he becomes a non-viable national candidate. That, they hope, will lead to a broad consensus in the party that running with Obama simply isn’t realistic and superdelegates flocking en masse to Clinton. The collateral damage of success on those terms would be vast. But there’s some limited evidence that she’s making progress on that front.
So are these poll numbers a blip or a sign of a fundamental rejiggering of the race?
Quasi-Correction: I didn’t refer to it explicitly. But I think in preparing this post I misread today’s Rasmussen daily tracking poll, thinking it had Clinton over Obama by 5 when in fact the reverse is the case. Yesterday he had a one point margin over her. This isn’t necessarily more than the background noise one finds day by day in a tracking poll. But it’s one nugget pointing away from the possible trend discussed in this post.
Late Update: TPM Reader CB chimes in …
I’m not at all surprised that Obama has dropped in the past couple of weeks and I think it speaks to one of the structural problems in the race right now. The conservative movement has laid into Obama hard on the Wright controversy, and the organized left (e.g., blogs, pundits, party leaders, activists) have not fought back in a collective sense. Obama and his partisans have fought back, of course, but those in the Hillary camp have not done so and the party leadership (probably in an effort not to appear biased one way or the other) has been relatively quiet as well. The effect is a pretty significant mismatch – it would be surprising if Obama did not lose ground under those circumstances.
I don’t think this is an Obama-specific phenomenon – in fact, if the roles were reversed and it had been Hillary who was under sustained attack from the right over the past couple of weeks, I think Obama partisans and the party leadership would be similarly silent. Rather, I think it speaks to a structural problem – because the Democrats don’t have a nominee, they can’t respond in a “team” sense to attacks from the other “team.” I don’t think that has to be the case – indeed, one could see it as a failure of the Democratic party leadership, who arguably should defend all Democratic candidates from attacks by Republicans on the grounds that the party’s nominee is ultimately a party issue in which Republicans have no place. But that is a tricky tact to take, in that it is difficult to defend a specific candidate from right-wing attacks without implicitly boosting that candidate to some degree. So it’s not surprising that the party leadership has opted for a more quiet role.
What worries me is that this structural imbalance will continue until there is a nominee (and probably a couple weeks after at least – it takes a while for the full party/movement apparatus to get behind a nominee under any circumstances, and the length and nature of this primary will likely exacerbate that tendency). In other words, if Hillary effectively takes the lead (in the sense of becoming the most probable Democratic nominee) and Obama does not drop out of the race, my guess is that we will see similar conservative ‘team-wide” attacks met by only partial responses. I’m not sure how to fix this situation – but I think the Democratic Party leadership (and others in the organized left) need to devise a solution if they want to preserve a realistic chance of winning, regardless of who is the candidate.
Thanks,
CB
P.S. I’m curious about the level of Republican activity/attacks on a primary candidate prior to their emergence as the nominee (or the inevitable nominee). I don’t have a clear sense on this, but it does seem greater than the degree of similar activity in past elections where one party had its nominee and the other party was still in a dogfight. But I’m not sure 1992 and 1996 really fall into that category (since the challenger nominee emerged relatively early in the process) and I don’t have clear memories of 1984. Put another way, how does the current Republican/conservative intervention in the Democratic primary stack up in historical terms?
