The Democrats: Pennsylvania Polling And National Polling

This poll, from Susquehanna Research, was conducted from April 6-10 using live interviewers. It had shown Sen. Clinton with a double digit lead in March; the lead was down to three last week. The poll does not reflect a weekend's worth of headlines and news coverage about a certain San Francisco fundraiser. The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg polled Thursday through Monday and found a very tight race. So far, no poll has picked up anything remotely resembling an Obama drop except for internal Clinton tracking. Usually, events like these take a few days to reach equilibrium.

When you ask various members of the Obama campaign about polling after Obama's remarks, they're likely to respond with a variant of a single answer: the coverage of these remarks are media-driven -- old media driven, at that. (It's true: once this story left the confines of the Huffington Post, it pretty much became a staple of the cablers, the newspapers, and the evening news.) Whenever the media tells them that they've misbehaved, Obama's supporters and the penumbra of undecided Democrats (who are really not undecided between two candidates -- they're just unsure whether they're going to vote for Obama) respond in equal fashion, exerting upwards pressure and reversing the trend of the storyline. The way in which the campaign expresses its confidence may be off-putting, but there are reasons for it. Those reasons are not, unfortunately, metaphysical; Obama's campaign does not posses the key to a body of knowledge that everyone else lacks.

Here's what I think is going on. Time after time, from the beginning of the campaign to now, the media has called Obama on a "major" gaffe or presented his reacton to an event as a "major" problem only to figure out a week later that Obama hasn't suffered a bit and Hillary Clinton numbers have dropped back down to about 40%. I've written about by Clinton Stock Price theory before: the Democratic primary electorate has been saturated with information about Clinton from time immemorial and her mean level of support -- her true value -- is about 40%. Sometimes it rises, sometimes is falls, but it usually progresses or regresses to the mean. Everything one can know, think, and feel about Hillary Clinton has been priced into her level of support. Well, add to that the perception that she's been the one has campaigned the most unfairly and the most negatively -- the exit polls pick this up even in states she's won.

I wonder if, when events cast a harsher light on Obama, Democrats blame Clinton instinctively because they're forced to make a binary choice and the nomination can't be awarded to two people. I also think that the degree to which Democrats believe that Barack Obama will win the nomination is one of the reasons why, especially now, his bumps on the road are sanded down a bit. There's just not that much at stake. Further, it's not clear whether the fact that John McCain and Hillary Clinton are tag-teaming Obama on this makes base Democrats more fearful of Obama's electoral politics or more resentful of Clinton's penchant for warning Obama about the awfulness of the Republican playbook and then operating from it. A final factor: Obama's supporters don't seem to mind Obama-the-cocky, but they love Obama the fighter. After all, it's their movement too. Nothing rouses the passions like the outrage of an insult. And nothing feels better than fighting back.