A poll released today by Quinnipiac University to celebrate tax day (just kidding) finds Pennsylvania — 4/9 through 4/13 Clinton 50%, Obama 44% — unchanged from 4/3-4/6.
“There was no noticeable difference in the matchup in polling April 12 – 13, following widespread media reports on Sen. Obama’s ‘bitter’ comments.”
Still, the debate was good for selling newspapers and generating discussion on the blogs.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program: old versus new.
Please share widely!
Survey USA, which has had a good track record this year (i.e. didn’t get drawn into some of the “neck and neck” polls of Cal, Ma, Ohio, etc), has HRC up 14 in Pa, 19 in Indiana, still behind in NC.
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p>American Research Group, which has had mixed results, has her up 20 in PA.
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p>Of course, I’m told that the voters still get to decide, at least in 48 of our states. đŸ™‚
… by pollster, before/after bittergate (from Mike’s RCP link):
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p>Quinnipiac: Clinton, +6 before, +6 after [no change]
ARG: Clinton, +0 before, +20 after [20 pt change!!]
Survey USA: Clinton, +18 before, +14 after [-4 change]
Rasmussen: Clinton, +5 before, +9 after [+4 change]
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p>So there’s no clear signal. I think the ARG results are suspect; looking back, they found Clinton at +12 in late March, tied last week, and now +20. That’s a lot of movment. PPP went Clinton +26 to Obama +2 to Clinton +3 (last week), so who knows what’s going on.
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p>On balance, my interpretation is:
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p>Bittergate hasn’t done much in PA (presuming the ARG results are not indicative; maybe they are)
Barring something incredible, Hillary’s very likely to win PA
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p>But of course the big question- by how much? If the gap is 10+ points, get ready for the great Democrat knife fight of 2008…
Sure this may be redundant, but Real Clear Politics is pretty handy for tracking the polls:
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p>http://www.realclearpolitics.c…
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p>Having a background in statistics, not sure how much I’d bet the farm on given any of these polls.
Obama’s completely clueless about fixing the economy for middle class voters white or otherwise, but she came off worse… equally clueless about what to do, but also out-of-touch with people who are suffering, and a robotic response on top of it all.
Please, will no-one think of the orange juice??
The people offended were probably Republicans anyhow, but this would cement them, and turn more swing voters. Not just in PA but across the country. All of that work trying to convince us of his faith, and now he reveals that the only reason he does it is for political support.
so obama may very well have won himself a few gop converts with his purported snobbery.
The people who were truly offended by the bitter comments weren’t voting for Obama in the first place and probably aren’t voting D in November anyway. Nothing to see here…
….by the comments. And I am definitely voting D in November.
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p>And for the record, I wasn’t offended because I am a heartland resident, fallen on hard times. I’m offended because the comments were dumb, factually inaccurate, and the worst kind of pandering.
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p>The assertion that guns, racism, homophobia and religious zealotry are the result of “hard times” is just not correct, and Obama is too smart not to know this. People who love their guns, love their guns, no matter the economy, and the same goes for religion and intolerance. During the heady nineties when everyone seemed to be doing well gun lovers had their “Charlton Heston is My President” bumper stickers, religious fundamentalists wanted an anti-gay marriage amendment and DOMA was a requirement for re-election, and the attack on bi-lingual education and welfare for illegals was at a fever pitch.
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p>Obama’s comments were nothing but stereotypical, small minded, clap trap, meant to appeal to prejudice. It painted a huge swath of people with a broad brush. The fact that they were intellectually beneath him just made it that much more offensive.
His economic plans are probably not going to help these people any more than Hillary’s plans.
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p>That said, nobody writes the apocalypse in a cadillac.
I think we agree that the comments were certainly dumb and ill-presented, but I suspect you’d be far less offended if you weren’t already an unabashed Clinton supporter.
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p>It’s politically opportunistic to be “offended,” but in the scheme of things this is “under sniper fire in Bosnia” and “100-years in Iraq.” It’s a distraction, it’s fluff, and anyone who dwells on it has nothing else to talk about.
I would like to see it drawn out some more and not swept under the rug. Does Obama believe voters vote against their economic interests?
…I am truly offended. Traffic in stereotypes and intolerance offends me, no matter who the source or whom the victim. It has nothing to do with it being Obama. Clinton’s stance on gay marriage offends me, as does Obama’s. It may be similar to the “under sniper fire” in that it illustrates character. I was disappointed by that, and a bit offended. Obama paints a very large percentage of the population with a wide, inaccurate brush, and insists still in doing so only with more controlled language. It offends me, period.
So you feel he was pandering to the people in San Fran, then? I agree he must have known that people who like their guns and intolerance like their guns and intolerance, and that the explanation he was offering wasn’t true. So perhaps he felt that explaining the truth of the matter to the people who were about to travel to PA to go door to door and meet these voters would have made them hostile to the PA voters they were about to meet. So he was trying to ward off that condescension they would soon develop by getting them to think that they weren’t bad people, they only were intolerant because they were bitter about the economy. He was justifiably worried that these San Fransiscans he was bringing in were such snobs (like all San Fransiscans are, they can’t help it, its the weather) that they would turn off the voters they were flying out to win over, especially if they had no easy explanation for why they weren’t as cool as San Fransiscans.
…it was a closed door fund raiser for big ticket donors, not a strategy session for volunteers, so the assertion that he was prepping campaing foot soldiers for work on the ground is silly. I hope it was intended to be.
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p>Second, he painted the enire population of rural Pennsylvania as intolerant, bitter and, essentially, stupid, so that is a problem. Nothing about his comments indicate he was trying to avert condescention for citizens of the area who are actually bigoted.
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p>But, yes, he was pandering to them. Encouraging and embracing stereotypes that some urbanites have about rural citizens to please the crowd, for no other reason than because he didn’t know “everyone” was listening.
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about what to expect in PA from someone going there to campaign. But even if most of the people in the room weren’t going there, I think it’s possible to see his answer not as pandering to them or flattering their sense of superiority but as an attempt to get wealthy SF people (probably pro-SSM people) to not be intolerant to the intolerant bigots. In other words it might not represent Obama’s view of why people are religious at all. That’s what I thought you were saying, you’re upset because he was condescending to the elite, not to the rural.
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p>I think I’m going to reverse myself again and see it that way.
Obama was trying to correct that same profound mistake of seeing things as static in the attitudes of those elites, who he probably cringes at when he hears them condescend to rural religious people in PA. He hoped that coming up with a good explanation related to something that they could relate to (money) would get them to be less intolerant and hateful.
..intentions, which I find hard to swallow, do not make any difference. If he is the man he claims he is in his campaign he should tell the truth, not pander to make people “understand” the intollerance of others. It just doesn’t hold up.
Based on Obama’s statement, reply to McCain and Hillary’s accusation, and the Charlie Rose clip from 2004, I don’t think Obama asserted that guns racism and homophobia were the result of hard times, he says that people are persuaded to vote on gun-driven, race-driven, and homophobia-driven wedge issues because these same people feel that their votes are useless on the larger issue of the economy, but they feel they can make an impact in the gay marriage debate, an issue that has been sold to them as “an assault on their faith and their values”.
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p>Obama was saying not that the so-called bitter people are cling to guns and faith because of bitterness – I think he acknowledges that they’d be into that stuff anyway – he’s saying that some voters have abandoned hope in expressing themselves on the economy through their vote, so they channel their voting energies on issues that have immediate and measurable results, like preserving/changing gun laws or passing gay marriage bans. You vote for the candidate who says s/he’s the one to turn the rustbelt economy around and 8 years later your wages are lower and cost of living is higher. But you vote on the winning side of a gun bill and the results are seen within months.
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p>Perhaps that idea is still offensive to people. And of course there are always people whose voting priorities are based on a single issue or two – the left does have it’s Green Party. Perhaps Obama should have painted with less broad strokes and said that some of the people who vote on gun/faith issues do so because they feel voiceless when it comes to matters of the economy. But I think if you listen to the fuller message of what Obama was trying to convey, the statement shouldn’t offend nearly as much as if the statements are read in the fashion in which you characterize them.
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p>I also think that Hillary and McCain jumping on Obama’s statements and mischaracterizing them early and often had a lot to do with the perception of what Obama was saying.
then why didn’t he say it? It gets really tiring hearing his supporters tell me all of these things that he meant. I thought articulateness was his strong suit. You’re telling me all of the things you think he meant, or you would like him to have meant. How can you claim to know what he really meant? Can’t he express an idea without a cleanup crew having to come in later and put everything “in context”?
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p>I happen to think he meant exactly what I heard him say. I’ve read the entire context, and gotten a sense of his atitudes throughout the campaign. I believe a trait that he shares with his followers is that he really can’t comprehend why anyone would oppose him, and has to attribute it to flaws in his opponents, rather than the possibility that people have taken an informed look at him and just don’t like what they see.
And it gets tiring of people hearing the sound bite – a la Rev Wright – and injecting whatever meaning that fits their agenda or buying in to whatever the other campaign says it means.
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p>I respect that you read it the other way and stated up front I didn’t suspect I’d change anyone’s mind. I was just presenting my view.
the way Obama supporters keep referring to this as some sort of sideshow, and a distraction from talking about the “real issues.” First of all, politicians generally don’t get to say “forget what I said, let’s talk about what I meant.” And I truly believe Obama meant what he said.
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p>What’s really annoying, though, is how a discussion about a candidate’s attitude towards the voters, and what he thinks motivates and is important to those voters, is somehow a sideshow. How much more relevant can the discussion get?
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p>His campaign has tried, with the help of many in the media, to turn this into a debate over whether people are disgruntled, just like they managed to make Rev. Wright all about race. Obama has tried hard to turn the discussion away from his remarks lumping xenophobia, anti-immigration intolerance, gun ownership anmd religion in the same basket. But not everyone’s buying that spin. And he wasn’t talking about “some people,” he was talking about “communities,” which is a much broader brush. Trying to conflate this with other Dems, including Bill Clinton, saying Republicans try to exploit people’s prejudices is just disingenuous. Obama was characterizing the attitudes of the voters, not talking about how Republicans try to exploit those attitudes.
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p>And the fact that he was spekaing to a group of wealthy San Franciscans, along with the way he spoke, made it clear he was talking to “us” about “them.”
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p>Obama’s campaign has labelled Hillary dishonest, unelectable, will do anything to win, lacking in character and a bunch of other personal attacks since last year. Now Obama does something stupid and Hillary is supposed to ignore it, or she’s “doing the Republicans’ work?” Obama supporters have to come to grips with the fact that he’s in a tight race, which he obviously is aware of if you look at his ad spending. He’s in position to get trounced in several of the remaining primaries, and to lose most of them. There’s no question he still has the advantage, but Hillary can hardly be blamed for campaigning against him.
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p>It’s hypocritical for Obama to accuse Hillary of “playing politics” by calling him out on his comments. I guess I missed the part where Obama explained the nuance behind McCain’s “100 years” comment. It’s not like he’s been beating that to death or anything.
Are you kidding? Obama’s voters have been psychoanalyzed up and down, mostly down in the case of his white female admirers.
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p>At least he cares why people don’t vote for him. His conclusions are wrong, but at least he appears to be educable.
Are you saying Hillary’s “low information” voters haven’t been psychoanalyzed? And what’s with the “white female admirers”? I haven’t seen his white female support particularly singled out.
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p>And are you also saying that Hillary, by contrast, doesn’t care why people don’t vote for her? You think she’s not doing polling, focus groups and message testing like every other candidate?