The latest Gallup Daily Tracking Poll provides the most vivid red flag warning yet for Democratic Senator Barack Obama in his battle with Senator Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination: presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain now enjoys a six point lead over Obama and only a one point lead over Clinton.
This will be a welcome piece of data for the Clinton campaign that has had as its strategy Obama not being electable (and many analysts say to make Obama that way):
John McCain has moved to a six percentage point, 48% to 42%, lead over Barack Obama in Gallup Poll Daily tracking of the general election, while he edges out Hillary Clinton by only one point, 46% to 45%.
The ongoing turmoil in the Democratic race — with neither candidate able to sustain a winning streak in the primaries and animosity seemingly mounting between them — seems to be benefiting McCain and hurting both Democrats. Last week McCain had fallen three points behind Clinton in the preferences of registered voters for the general election, and only tied Obama.
Although both Clinton and Obama have lost ground to McCain over the past week, the current results may be particularly troubling for Obama in trying to combat Clinton’s assertion to superdelegates that she would be the more electable of the two candidates in November.
This is McCain’s largest lead in a tracking poll:
The current six-point margin for McCain over Obama is the largest lead McCain has had over either candidate since Gallup began tracking general election preferences in early March. The gap between Obama and Clinton’s percentage of the vote when both are pitted against McCain is also the largest since the general election tracking began.
The bottom line: the contest is not benefiting the Democratic party, as some have claimed — and Obama has lost a host of support since his former pastor decided to extend his 15 minutes of fame into several long public appearances.
The question: can Obama stabilize his campaign in time for the important upcoming North Carolina and Indiana primaries?
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.