Is Clinton’s Pennsylvania Lead Really 20 Points?
A new survey showing Sen. Hillary Clinton leading Sen. Barack Obama by 20 percentage points in Pennsylvania comes from a polling firm with a shaky track record this election season.
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Other pollsters’ numbers disagree with ARG’s. Clay Richards, who runs the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute’s Pennsylvania poll, said he doesn’t expect his poll that will be published Tuesday to show much difference from the last one, which had a Clinton lead of six points. “I don’t see that much movement in Pennsylvania myself,” Mr. Richards said by phone from Harrisburg on Monday. He declined to comment specifically on his rival’s contradictory numbers.
Discrepancies among white voters account for much of the difference. Quinnipiac’s last poll showed Sen. Clinton leading among non-college-educated white voters, 62% to 31%; that was similar to her margin among all white voters (64% to 29%) in the ARG poll, which didn’t ask about education (Mr. Bennett told me he intends to add the question for future polls in the state). By contrast, Sen. Obama leads among college-educated white voters in Pennsylvania, 54% to 42%, according to Quinnipiac. In the last ARG poll, Sen. Clinton’s lead among white voters had been 52% to 36%.
Both pollsters agreed that Sen. Obama hasn’t been hurt much by his remarks about small-town Pennsylvania voters last week. Mr. Bennett said few respondents mentioned them. Mr. Richards said, “My hunch is won’t make much of a difference because most voters who might feel insulted by his comments were already Clinton voters or republicans who weren’t going to vote for him, anyway.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/is-clintons-pennsylvania-lead-really-20-points-319/