Democratic Senator Barack Obama now shows a spike in his polling against rival Senator Hillary Clinton in his battle for the Democratic nomination — opening up a 7 percent lead, the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll shows.
Polls — particularly this tempestuous and fickle primary season — are see-saws, but this poll is significant coming as it does amid news of a steady trickle (if not stream) of news of convention superdelegates pledging their support to Obama, plus news cycles carrying stories about how Obama is now turning his campaign to focus on presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain.
It’s all part of a gathering consensus among Democrats — and apparently superdelegates — that barring some major event or mega toe-stubbing, Obama will be the party’s nominee. Details:
For the first time in nearly three weeks, the statistical tie between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Gallup Poll Daily tracking of national Democratic preferences has been broken, with Obama now ahead by seven percentage points, 50% to 43%.
This is based on national interviews with Democratic voters from May 9-11. Importantly, Obama has led Clinton in each individual day of polling included in today’s three-day rolling average, as well as the two days prior to that. Such stability was absent from the race for the past several weeks when Clinton and Obama often traded nightly leads in Gallup Poll Daily tracking and, as a result, neither candidate could achieve a significant leg up over the other in national preferences.
And why is this happening?
Although Obama did not achieve an immediate bounce in national Democratic support after last week’s primary elections in Indiana and North Carolina, it could be that the subsequent political punditry, proclaiming the Clinton campaign is effectively over, is affecting voters.
With Clinton continuing to campaign hard, concerns about what the protracted Clinton-Obama battle could do to the party’s chances of beating probable Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, in the fall, continue to be raised. However, according to Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 7-11, both Democratic candidates are now beating McCain among national registered voters in Gallup Poll Daily trial heats for the fall election.
In other words: as some of the suspense as to who the Democratic nominee will be winds down, voters are taking a harder look now at McCain who has been able to sit back and watch the squabbling Democrats make him look Presidential by comparison.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.