After days showing Senator Hillary Clinton on the ascent against her chief rival for the Democratic Presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama, the latest Gallup Daily Tracking poll now puts Obama slightly ahead:
The peeling away of national Democratic support for Barack Obama seen this past week may have run its course. After trailing Hillary Clinton by one percentage point in Saturday’s Gallup Poll Daily tracking report, Obama now leads Clinton by two points, 47% to 45%.
Obama’s largest lead to date in the Democratic nomination race came less than a week ago when he led Clinton by 11 points, 51% to 40%. However, Obama’s support began to erode slightly even before the highly publicized April 16 Democratic debate in Philadelphia, and fell more significantly in the two days immediately after it. His advantage whittled away to a 1-point deficit in April 16-18 tracking, the first time since mid-March that Clinton’s share of the vote exceeded Obama’s, albeit by a statistically insignificant margin.
In a race seemingly constrained by the laws of motion — “what goes up must come down” –, Obama has for now stemmed the recent drop in his support and is back in front of Clinton, albeit with a non-significant 2-point lead.
To see what other polls are finding, go to THIS PAGE on Pollster.com (which has not yet added this poll to its collection or its graph).
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.