Gallup Daily Tracking: McCain As Flawed Republican Candidate?

The latest Gallup Daily tracking poll is out and while it still shows Senator Barack Obama with a healthy lead over Senator Clinton in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, the numbers have also sparked a discussion about whether a pattern is emerging: Republican presumptive nominee Senator John McCain as a candidate who can’t get much above a certain number.

The boilerplate numbers, for those keeping track of the poll’s every twist and turn, are these:

Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton in national Democratic preferences for the nomination, 50% to 42%, in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from April 20-22.This marks the third straight day Obama has had a significant lead over Clinton, although he held a slightly higher 10 percentage point advantage in Tuesday’s report.

The latest three-day rolling average includes interviewing on Tuesday night, partially conducted as the returns of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary were coming in. However, the impact of Clinton’s 10-point win in that election on national Democratic preferences is not yet evident in the data.

With Obama currently leading Clinton nationally by eight points, it appears Pennsylvania is not a Democratic bellwether state. However, if the Clinton campaign is successful in using her solid Pennsylvania victory to argue she is the more electable candidate of the two in the fall, then she could start to close the gap with Obama in Gallup Poll Daily tracking over the next few days.

But some Internet pundits have noted another number: how McCain is shown as one point ahead of Obama, 46 to 45 percent and ahead of Clinton 47 to 46 percent. What is notable: he hasn’t moved all that much in many polls.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohen writes:

If McCain is getting a free ride, it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. He’s running no stronger against either candidate than he was before the Wright story, Bittergate, or the Bosnia controversy.

It’s possible McCain’s numbers are stagnant simply because Clinton and Obama soaking up all of the media attention. But there may be another explanation, one I know I’ve read elsewhere (maybe in a Gallup analysis, though I can’t find it now): That 45 percent figure represents a ceiling of his support.

After all, barring some outside shock to the political system, there is no reason to think McCain’s numbers will go up. People already have overwhelmingly positive feelings about him–stronger than about either of the Democratic candidates. They see him as a likeable, principled war hero whom they trust on national security. Very few realize that he has supported privatizing Social Security, that he opposes universal health insurance, that he supports free trade without qualification, and so on. Once the voters learn these things, at least some of them are likely to abandon him.

If anything, McCain has the look of an Internet stock circa 1999: Great numbers, lousy fundamentals.

Kevin Drum also sees this as reflecting a McCain Achilles heel:

McCain simply isn’t as strong a candidate as people seem to think he is. Factors working against him include Bush fatigue, a declining economy, his age, his need to pander heavily to the Christian right, his hawkishness in a year when the public isn’t feeling very hawkish, his history of flip flopping for transparently political reasons, and a portfolio of extremely unpopular positions (like privatizing Social Security) that Democrats can make a lot of hay with in the fall. What’s more — and go ahead, call me an optimist — I suspect that at some point there’s going to be a press backlash against McCain. His media image is a bubble, sustained by a sort of childlike faith, and once that faith starts to wobble — something that may already have started — the bubble is likely to pop. Before long, I suspect that a lot of reporters are going to start recognizing his faux openness as more faux than open.

Of course, this all assumes that Hillary Clinton decides not to be completely suicidal and take down the party in a huge ball of flames. But I don’t think she will. Even the Clintons have to bow to reality eventually.

The last statement is conventional wisdom…and we’ve already seen how accurate conventional wisdom has been this year….

Meanwhile, Steve Benen weighs in:

McCain, as a candidate, isn’t especially scary at all. He’s clumsy, unprincipled, arrogant, often belligerent, and usually confused. He was the best Republican candidate in the GOP field, but it was an awfully weak field.

But taking all of this into consideration, that’s all the more incentive to end the Democratic race and get the general election started. Like, now. Dems have a very powerful case to make against McCain, but they can’t make it while the party is divided in half, and they’re waiting until late August for a nominee.

McCain has high favorability ratings, nearly universal name ID, and the enduring love of every major news outlet in the country. The sooner Dems start making their case against McCain — which really isn’t that tough to make — Dems can position themselves for an incredibly successful, possibly even historic, year — at the top of the ballot on down.

The chances of this happening in a truncated, eight-week general election campaign, with a divided Democratic Party and a Republican nominee that will have a five-month head start, are considerably less. Cohn argues that it can come together for Dems anyway, so the party can just be patient and let all of this play out.

I’m not nearly as optimistic.

I agree with Benen.

If the Presidential election is viewed in a kind of vacuum with a Democrat in a normal year running against McCain, it could be argued that McCain isn’t getting much higher in the polls and could face problems once the Democrats get a nominee.

In fact, Robert Novak reports:

Obama’s difficulties and the prolongation of the Clinton-Obama confrontation have lifted Republicans from their slough of despondence to optimism about the presidential election. The transformation from deep pessimism to overriding optimism is such that McCain is privately warning supporters that once the nomination is decided and supporters of the losing Democratic candidate return to the fold, he will fall behind badly (though, McCain hopes, temporarily).

But what is most likely to happen? Unless there is some major development, Clinton will press her campaign — using as its tactic campaigning to raise Obama’s negatives so she can argue he is unelectable — at least into early June, or perhaps all the way to the convention. Many polls now report that Clinton and Obama supporters won’t vote for the other man/woman.

McCain is probably the strongest GOP candidate for 2008 because of his appeal to increasingly important independent swing voters. But some of the support is indeed “soft” and can be peeled away by a comprehensive Democratic campaign against him, particularly noting his many flip-flops on stands he originally took in his losing 2000 campaign. And — most assuredly — editors and reporters will cover anything that turns up about his background, or any of his political blunders.

Remember the unintentional press narrative that often emerges: the front runner rises, the front runner is solidly ahead, the front runner stumbles, the front runner is no longer the front runner and finally (in most but not all cases) the former front runner makes a dramatic comeback…and is the frontrunner.

The problem: media, public discourse, talk radio and blog oxygen is being sucked up by the increasingly ugly and personal Obama-Clinton campaign and the animosity of the camps of both of these candidates. Media attention often is determined by conventional wisdom and the idea of reader/viewer “interest.” No political story is as fascinating as the story of a political party that seemed to have it in the bag, ripping the bag wide open, releasing it’s contents and stomping on the bag.

All of the factors that could be cited that suggest McCain is a flawed candidate could be valid but must be looked at within this context: both Obama and Clinton are looking increasingly flawed as they fire political Uzis into each other. By COMPARISON, McCain is looking lofty and presidential and is not being painstakingly challenged.

McCain is solidifying his imagery the way he wants it to look..and doing it effectively. The two Democrats are working hard (and effectively) to tear down each others’ imagery…and they’re doing it effectively.

In any other year, McCain’s alleged polling ceiling would be highly significant. But viewed against the backdrop of what the two Clintons and Obama are doing to each other — and their party — McCain’s flaws may not matter much. Particularly if a sizable chunk of disappointed Clinton supporters or Obama supporters decide to teach the other candidate a lesson and stay home on Election Day.

On a related issue, be sure to read The Daily Kos’ Kos’ detailed analysis of Clinton and Obama electability.

FOOTNOTE: Who was the most accurate pollster in predicting the Pennsylvania vote? It was this pollster who contends Obama didn’t lose due to Clinton’s negativity, but his own political mistakes.