Each company has their own biases and a Public Strategies number cannot be combined with Rasmussen numbers to create a trend line.

Bottom line? IMHO? Texas is very very close.

Also, these polls do NOTHING to alter the delegate math analysis coming from the Texas Two Step primary process.

There's nothing mysterious about 46%-43%.  It is in line with Rasmussen and other polls that show it a dead heat or Obama slightly ahead.  

Since this is the first poll for this organization, they don't have any trend lines we can look at.   Did she improve from their last poll?  Where was she two weeks, one month, two months ago?

If this poll showed her 10 or 20 points ahead in TX then we would have reason to be puzzled.

Obama has been outperforming the polls, and I imagine that will continue.  But in any case, Hillary not only needs wins, but she needs very big wins to get close to Obama in pledged delegates.  It's not clear to me why anyone thinks that such a scenario is likely.  Am I missing something?

Once again, reverse the situations and ask yourself. Wouldn 't Obama have been run out of the race by now if he was the one who had lost 11 contests, whatever the actual number of delegates ?

get it?

That there is NO REASON for Clinton to drop out now.

I have consistently said here and at DK that it's foolish and unnecessary talk.

We can reassess on March 5 - but absolutely, let's see the 3/4 results.

I don't think the MOE on the Public Strategies poll -- 4.4 -- is pretty high, no?  Isn't the general rule that the closer you get to 5, the less likely the poll tells us much?

I do agree that it's going to be close.

We'll see.

I'm trying to see if I can swing a couple days off work next week to try to help out in Ohio.  It's a solid 4-5 hour drive from Illinois, but I've got friends near Columbus that are going to be GOTV for Obama.

I feel pretty good about TX - but I DEARLY want Ohio.

Realizing that yes, delegates and all, it's the last "hurdle" Obama really needs to clear.

Winning a key swing state with demographics that aren't favorable to him, a big state to boot.

IF he wins Ohio - Clinton is still welcome to stay in the race as long as she wishes to go foward... but this primary would be over, for all practical purposes.

I find it odd that you say rasmussen offers teh best trendline.  sure, there's three compared to four, but they're only one-day polls.

SUSA's 2 polls are over 3 days each, the first is +5 C, the 2nd +4 O

CNN's 2 over 3 days: +2 C to +4 O.

Nowhere is the trend in Texas over the past 2 weeks clearer

This line doesn't give you pause?  If the trend isn't clear in other polls maybe it's not as strong as advertised.

Or maybe it's just the way you wrote it...

Actually it is still a surprise that she is so close. If you believe Maureen Dowd or the press in general this should be 64/40 in BOs favor.

I think that she is still standing means its not over. If Obama wins on Tuesday case closed its over.  If he is this movement why can he not blow her away in the 2 big states one (Ohio) that matters in the GE.

She is standing on her own merit no other candidate would even be close. She is also raising significant amount of money on the internet she may raise close to 30 mil in a month. But her success on the internet does not get reported. Anyways its all about winning on Tuesday. If HRC wins she gets to play in the next round if she looses she goes back to senate.

This theme of winning big is the SPIN from obama camp to get her to drop out and most of the bloggers and pundits have bought it. Just like the drudge photo.

would make a great VP, but he already is losing to McCain in the latest head-to-head. He has been a media darling and McCain has had some bad press. Apparently, the nation does not want a community organizor for Commander-in-Chief.

The issues that were not big in the Dem primary will loom large in the general election. Experience does count.

How much better can press get for a candidate and he still doesn't even get to 50% against McCain, he loses by 2.

Unless there is a miracle and Hillary wins, the Dem's have done it again: picked a candidate that will get destroyed in the general election.

Could someone please lay out for us the realistic scenario by which Clinton wins the nomination?  

This may be a reputable poll. But I've never heard of it. SUSA I trust and they've got Obama up 4.

Look at the results of question 10d.  If you add it up - Obama's ahead 45-43 - in line with other polls.  The Poll summary has it backwards.  This makes the whole diary moot.

Can someone please gag Maureen Dowd?  Please?  Anyone?

I understand the desire to seize on any piece of good news for one's candidate, but this poll does not imply anything favorable about the intentions of Texas voters. It shows a tie, which is what most of the other polls show, as well.

The two candidates are separated by less than the margin of error. The margin of error is a real thing, as real as anything in a poll, it's not like some obscure warning label in the fine print, nudge nudge, wink wink, it'll never happen. "Lead" less than the MoE = no lead, tied up. Period.

A limited exception to this rule is when you are comparing polls taken with identical methods in series. Then the trend line can give you some information. But you can't compare different polls that way. The difference between them is much more likely to be due to differences in their methodology.

As for the point about Maureen Dowd, I'd say three things:

1. The race in Texas would be pretty close if it were held today. But it isn't being held to today. Part of the reason people are writing Clinton's obit is because it's tied up, with a week to go. And we know what happens in the course of that week. We're seen this movie before.

2. Smart, high information voters prefer Obama disproportionally compared to the population as a whole. Since journalists mostly fall into this category, they tend to think like Obama supporters and know a lot of Obama supporters. This could indeed affect their calculus.

3. If you watched the Chicago Bulls in the prime of Michael Jordan finish a quarter up by two, would you say the game was close? It would be close, of course. But that doesn't mean the odds are even.

Doesn't Clinton have to win big in both states to close the delegate gap? Now it's a "win" if she manages to eke out a popular vote victory?

Talk about moving the goalposts...

Hillary's largest problem, as I have consistently maintained is one that all the nuetral pundits have lain out.

That is that given her deficit of primary/pledged delegates, she MUST win both OH and TX by more than 25 points or so to have a chance of catching up to Obama.  Should she "win" by less than 10, she has to split the delgates almost equally, and in fact may actually come up short with delgates (like Supertuesday) even with a 10 point win.

Should this occur in EITHER state (much less both states) she will then need 35-40 point blow outs in ALL of the remaining races to catch up to Obama.

This is not spin folks.  These are the facts, as cruel as they can be.  

So please, PLEASE Obama supporters...don't be jerks about this stuff and belittle Hillary for trying to win the blowuts...she HAS to try, as is her right!  And, Hillary supporters don't spin or try to convince yourselves that anything less than a HRC landslide does anything more than making the party elders send out more Chris Dodds to send the message.

Rspectfully,

Guns.

First of all, Obama has been consistently outperforming polls, owing to his superior ground game.

But on top of that, Obama will most likely win the delegate count even if he loses the popular vote.  That's because Senate Districts decide delegate count and SD's favorable to Obama outweigh those favorable to Clinton in delegate counts as general rule because the former SD's have historically turned out Democrats at rates higher than the latter ones, which makes the Democratic Party assign them more weight.

On top of that, Obama has another distinct advantage in that many delegates are assigned by precinct caucuses, which favor Obama for two reasons:

1) he has more motivated supporters who actively show up to caucuses;
2) his supporters understand the rules better and have been preparing for this for a long time, while Clinton's people apparently only realized there were precinct caucuses a couple of weeks ago.

The bottom line is that according to the people at Burnt Orange Report who have done a systematic analysis of Texas' delegate allocation, Obama could lose the popular vote by up to five points and still come out ahead on delegate allocation.

Except for Huckabee, it usually is fairly obvious to the candidate when he or she should call it quits. And this point is almost always before they are mathematically eliminated. Look, Edwards dropped out only after a few states had voted. At that point in time, he had almost as good of a mathematical chance as did Obama or Clinton.

You drop out when the probability drops to a point where it isn't feasible for you to win, when your money starts drying up, when the general population starts focusing on the other person, or for a number of other reasons. Most people don't want to continue on in what looks like a futile effort. And whatever we state on MyDD (or dkos, or OpenLeft) isn't going to influence what Clinton or Obama are ultimately going to do.

if he ticks upward tomorrow in this tracking poll?  You have NO IDEA what the trends are for this poll because this is the first time we've seen it.  Obama could have been down 8 last week and now 3, tomorrow tied, etc, etc.  We just don't yet know?

I think the most important polls to watch (and that's with a grain of salt, given how inaccurate polling has been on many occasions) will be the ones conducted after the last debate. I think Hillary won the debate and the debate got big ratings, so obviously people in both Texas and Ohio were watching, and what's most important are those undecideds going to experience versus speeches.

As far as the dynamics of the race goes, victories in Ohio and Texas change the narrative of the race completely and will propel Hillary right back into it. Sure, the press, which has had a strong bias against her, will still try to make it seem as if she is out of this but Hillary is a fighter and has been facing these types of heinous attacks for almost 2 decades.

Hopefully there will be polls conducted over the weekend that will show the results that Hillary's win at the debates had.

I posted this once before, but it's worth repeating.  IMHO, this is the single most perceptive blog comment of this primary season.

------------------------

"Bill Clinton's argument is that Texas is unfair because it has a caucus in addition to a primary, and, as the Clintons have been arguing, caucuses are less democratic than primaries. It's certainly true, caucuses give disproportionate weight to well-organized party activists over ordinary voters. But you know what gives even more weight to well-organized party activists over ordinary voters than the caucus system? Superdelegates. And the Clintons obviously have no objection to that."

* Jonathan Chait  -
 http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank /archive/2008/02/25/texas-doesn-t-count. aspx

from all this spin.

Obama wins Texas.
Within 5 points in Ohio.

Obama is the nominee on 3/5.

Tie goes to Obama.  Too many pledged delegates to make up.

The DNC must be secretly praying that HRC loses either Ohio or TX

because if HRC wins Ohio, TX and PA--and is also ahead in the cumulative aggregate % popular vote (incl Fla and MI after awarding the MI undecided to Obama)---then there will unprecedented pressure to seat Fla and MI concurrently and to also choose HRC as our nominee with SD's jumping into it.

Great point.

This is the Democratic primary. Obama has been winning in most states with the help of "independents," or in other words in open primaries/caucuses. This would lead me to believe that there are a lot of Republicans voting just to undermine Hillary. I've heard that in the beginning Republican radio hosts were pushing for this to happen, so it wouldn't surprise me if Obama's "independent" support is really just Clinton haters on the Republican side that won't vote for Obama in the general election.

This should be a main contention used by the Clinton campaign at the convention. Again, this is the Democratic nomination process. If he isn't consistantly winning a majority of Democrats, then the automatic delegates should take a hard look at whether or not Obama will carry crucial states like New York and California.

in today's new and improved version of this tracking poll.

http://www.khou.com/news/local/politics/ stories/khou080227_tj_texaspoll.3a91068. html

Look at what I said yesterday: http://www.mydd.com/comments/2008/2/27/1 9593/5677/54#54

This is Bushit. Listening to NPR yesterday, they were touting that Republicans were voting for Obama in mass in Texas. They expressed surprise that he had such cross-over appeal. No mention of the real situation in that they are gaming the Democratic primary in Texas to kill Clinton's nomination. Its so obvious. But nobody is saying it. Its right out of the Rove playbook and dems are falling for it again. This is the stuff that allowed 2 terms of Bush. This is the stuff that got Al Gore defeated in 2000. Here we go again. They are managing to split the party along with Obama's help. More info on Obama shirking his duties in the Senate please.

That Rasmussen is going to show an Obama +4 lead today?

is all that much better than Clinton's. It's not, if you look at NH and MA, two states where I was on the ground for Clinton, we kicked the living shit out of the Obama organizers.

well ask Obama to drop out and we can move on