Polling Reflects Chips in Obama's Image

Enlarge

Three weeks ago, Sen. Barack Obama enjoyed a double-digit lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton, a Pew Research Center poll found. Now, the latest Pew survey shows that edge has all but evaporated.

Among registered Democrats and voters likely to lean Democratic, 47 percent said in the new poll that they favored Obama, compared with 45 percent who backed Clinton. That's a marked difference from the results of the survey conducted in March, when Obama led his rival for the Democratic presidential nod with 49 percent support to her 39 percent.

The president of the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut, tells Robert Siegel that the Illinois senator's "slippage [is] powered by an even greater role of both race and class in the patterns of the answers."

For instance, Clinton's lead among white Democrats who did not attend college rose from 10 points in March to 40 points in the current survey, which was based on phone interviews of 651 people from April 23-27. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 4.5 percentage points.

While the Pew survey reflects that Obama's image is still "very good," Kohut says, there has been a "modest decline in it across the board." At the same time, Clinton has made gains but the poll doesn't show that her image has improved in the eyes of voters.

"In fact, in some respects, her image is worse than it was when she was 10 points behind," Kohut says.

When Democratic voters in the April poll were asked to rate the New York senator's character traits, 57 percent found her honest, compared with 65 percent in March. To boot, 35 percent in the current poll said she was a "phony," while 29 percent took that view of her in March. By contrast, Obama's honesty ranking dropped five percentage points in April, to 75 percent, while he gained five percentage points in the phoniness category, to 19 percent

"Democratic voters are very conflicted about these candidates. They're feeling worse about each of them. They're feeling worse about the nature of the race," Kohut says.

He added that 51 percent of respondents in the new poll say the fact that the race remains unsettled is a bad thing for the Democratic Party — compared with 41 percent in March and just 27 percent February.

Among black voters, Kohut says, Clinton's numbers resemble those of a Republican.

"The black vote, since South Carolina, has gotten behind Barack Obama and stands behind him not only in the primaries, but now in these national polls," he says. "Voting along racial lines and along lines of education and income is very apparent in these primaries."

As for a general election, the latest Pew poll suggests that neither Obama nor Clinton have a clear electability advantage when matched up against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. As in the March survey, both Democrats edged McCain by a small margin — 4 or 5 percentage points.

Clinton does better against McCain among base Democrats, while Obama runs a better race among independents.

"So, each of them, overall, comes out about even, but comes out about the same in different ways," Kohut says.

He acknowledges that historically, polls in May have not been good indicators for results in November. And yet they give some sense of what to expect over the course of the campaign.

"This one is looking to be a much closer race than we expected," he says.