Most of the interesting polling lately has been on the primary side of the ledger, but the Clinton campaign has to be heartened by today’s series of Quinnipiac polls in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania:
State | Agency | Reliability | Date | Obama | Clinton |
FL | Quinnipiac | **** | 3/28 | McCain +9 | Clinton +2 |
OH | Quinnipiac | **** | 3/28 | Obama +1 | Clinton +9 |
PA | Quinnipiac | **** | 3/28 | Obama +4 | Clinton +8 |
While these polls aren’t bad news for Obama — his Florida result is poor, but that is a state in which we’d already projected an uphill battle for him — these are nevertheless exactly the sort of numbers that Clinton is going to want to see if she is to make a credible case about electability to the superdelegates.
The caution is that polling in each of these states has been fairly abundant, and we have Quinnipiac rated as a good-but-not-great pollster, so they don’t move the state-by-state estimates all that much. Still, every little bit counts in big states like these. On the strength of these numbers, Hillary’s win percentage has improved from 53% to 59% in Ohio; from 47% to 52% in Pennsylvania, and from 37% to 41% in Florida. Obama’s win percentage has fallen from 20% to 17% in Florida, but risen from 37% to 39% on Ohio, and from 45% to 47% in Pennsylvania.