Opinion: Dems ponder McCain if their Obama or Clinton lose, poll reveals
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
A new Gallup poll today has some ominous early warning signs about the ongoing struggle for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. The longer it goes, the deeper the split.
Already, the inconclusive primaries have given Sen. John McCain valuable weeks to organize his national effort, work on uniting conservatives, raise money and, perhaps most importantly, start to tell his own positive personal campaign narrative while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still finding faults with each other.
And because the policy differences between the two are infinitesimal, the focus falls on superficial squabbles over pastors, sleep deprivation, what surrogate speakers misspoke and should be shot.
The longer the Democratic struggle, the more bitter will be the feelings among the....
losing camp, the reasonable fear goes. Now, the new Gallup poll already indicates many Democrats are so wed to their choice that they’d sooner switch parties than fight for their candidate’s rival.
Twenty-eight percent of Democrats backing Clinton tell the pollsters they’d vote for Republican McCain over fellow Democrat Obama. And 19% of Obama backers say they’d vote for McCain before voting for Clinton. Such numbers, even if slightly overstated this early in a presidential year, could play a significant swing role since McCain has been quite adept over the years at attracting independents and Democrats.
McCain would welcome any of them, though the working class demographics of Clinton’s fans suggest the old Reagan Democrats might be more susceptible to the GOP argument. And Tuesday, that late president’s widow Nancy did, indeed, endorse McCain.
Of course, that’s what they say now -– in the heat of a Democratic campaign that has only increased in intensity as the two have entered a virtual deadlock that may only be broken by the intervention of the party’s unelected “superdelegates. This is what voters were telling Gallup’s pollsters in telephone samples compiled from March 7 to March 22 –- with responses drawn from a huge sample of 6,657 Democrats, providing a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points.
Come November, with Democrats motivated to reclaim the White House and Democrats theoretically turning out in the same record numbers as in this year’s primaries, the numbers may tell a different story.
“As would be expected,’ said Gallup’s editor in chief, Frank Newport, ‘almost all Democratic voters who say they support Obama for their party’s nomination also say they would vote for him in a general election match-up against McCain. But only 59% of Democratic voters who support Clinton say they would vote for Obama against McCain, while 28 % say they would vote for the Republican McCain.
“This suggests that some Clinton supporters are so strongly opposed to Obama (or so loyal to Clinton) that they would go so far as to vote for the ‘other’ party’s candidate next November if Obama is the Democratic nominee,’’ Newport notes. “The results follow the same pattern, but not to quite the same extent, when the relationship between Democratic support and a general election match up between Clinton and McCain is examined.’
Newport adds: “It is worth noting that in Gallup’s historical final preelection polls from 1992 to 2004, 10% or less of Republicans and Democrats typically vote for the other party’s presidential candidate.’’
But that’s seven months away. Looking back seven months, former Sen. Fred Thompson looked like he was going to give former Mayor Rudy Giuliani a real run for the GOP nomination. Neither got past Florida. And that Arizona senator McNabb or McClain was clearly out of the running.
--Mark Silva and Andrew Malcolm
Mark Silva writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune’s Washington Bureau.