Update: Obama is back on top in the latest Gallup poll!
Time Magazine – Mark Halperin – Saturday March 22, 2008:
1. She can’t win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats.
2. She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.
3. Catching up in the popular vote is not out of the question — but without re-votes in Florida and Michigan it will be almost as impossible as catching up in elected delegates.
4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don’t think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.
5. Obama’s skilled, close-knit staff can do things like silently kill re-votes in Florida and Michigan and not pay a political price.
6. Many of her supporters — and even some of her staffers — would be relieved (and even delighted) if she quit the race; none of his supporters or staff feel that way. Some think she just might throw in the towel in June if it appears efforts to fight on would hurt Obama’s general election chances.
7. The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee — and that has an impact every day.8. Obama might not be able to talk that well about the new global economy, but she (and McCain) can’t either.
9. Many of the remaining prominent superdelegates want to be for Obama and she (and Harold Ickes) are just barely keeping them from making public commitments to him.
10. She can’t publicly say more than 2% of all the things she would like to say about race, electability, beating McCain and experience.
11. If she somehow found a way to win the nomination, she would have to offer Obama the veep slot, and she doesn’t want to do that.
12. This is a change election, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can never truly be change.
13. Obama is having fun most days, and she isn’t.
14. Even though her campaign staff is having more fun than it has for a long time, there’s hardly anyone there who, given half a chance, wouldn’t slit Mark Penn’s throat — and such internal dissension won’t help her in the home stretch.
#8…ArianeB… A big chunk of the far right are still on that Hillary is the easy one to beat road. But most of the conservative and moderate political writers think thats a wrong assumption. They have felt since Super Duper Tuesday that Obama may actually be the easist(not that either is **easy**) for McCain to beat. People don’t seem to like Hillary, but she appeals to the almost same demographics as McCain. Middle class white men, seniors, high school educated women and moderates. Only among Independents does she lose badly to McCain, but she polls far better with blacks, and she does a bit better with Hispanics.
And when they do head to heads with her and McCain, she is either a bit ahead or not far behind, and she holds most of Kerry’s blue states and could pick off a couple red states(Arkansas for 1, though McCain just pulled ahead of her there this w/e in the new SurveyUSA state by state polls).
Obama on the other hand appeals to blacks overwhelmingly, college educated, high income liberals, those under 30 and women. But he splits the 30 to 50 age group with McCain and loses white men by 38% to McCain and loses Hispanics by 16%. Obama would , at this stage lose Minn., Pa., New Jersey to McCain(and he’s down 2% in Mass.) and McCain would lose Wisc., New Mexico and Colorado to Obama. McCain would keep all of the rest of Bush’s 2004 red states. Though Virginia is on the line and could go Obama or McCain.
So, they think that McCain would be lucky to be able to face Obama(and thats also the impression you get when you talk to Charlie Black, McCains campaogn manager).
#31, joshua,
McCain leads or is tied in the 2 main daily tracking polls….Rasmussun and Gallop. Both of these polls have been the 2 top predictors for the primaries along with SurveyUSA. The problem with Survey is it’s a robocall poll and they can go off on a tangent if there isn’t enough answered calls.
Rasmussen is NOT a reliable polling company. Their polls are slanted to the right wing candidate. While there may always be some variance and statistical error, Rasmussun routinely exceeds that margin.
I find the Gallup Poll fairly reliable. Much better than those Gallop people.
When Obama ends up going head to head with McCain, McCain will falter and look more the fool than he already does. There won’t be any more of the right wing “me too” affairs.
For anyone who likes to check out the polls just to see how wrong they can be there are 3 pretty good sites.
One is pollster.com….they have all of the latest polls, but can be a couple days behind quite often. Another is Presidentialpolls.com….not to bad, they show all of the latest polls and usually have a little blurb from each polling company explaining the results and the methodology. And the third is realpolitics.com….this one is very extensive and usually have the polls with in hours of their being released. They show all the polls being done and then for each candadte they take the last 10 polls or so and average them. They have head to head, Democratic primary polls, aand Republican polls. What I really like is on their home page they have anywhere from 15 to 20 or sometimes more daily political column’s from all parts of the political spectrum and sources. It makes it easy to read what just about every top political writer in the country is saying on an almost daily basis. They do a lot of Slate and Daily Kos and Solon as well as Newsweek, Time, NYT, Wash. Post, L.A. Times Weekly Standard, WSJ….you name it they have the latest from all these sources best writers. Even top writers from British newspapers and blogs. Just about anything you want to read is there.
When you go to the site, hit *polls* and then there is a heading *latest polls* and they have every poll done each day, so you can look back through them and see who’s rising and who’s falling.
For political nerds or just casual watchers it’s a cool site.
There are even articles on which polls are the most accurate and why or the most inaccurate and why and methodology.