Hillary Clinton has vowed to stay in the race for the Democratic nomination until the last primaries and on into the Convention, hoping to convince the party she should be the choice to run for the November general election. What do the polls say?
According to an ABC poll, six out of ten democrats say Hillary SHOULD stay in the race for the Presidency, saying that there is "no rush" for her to make her withdrawal from the primary process. What's surprising in the survey is that of that 60% of democrats who think she should stay in, 42% claim to be Obama supporters.
That's not a majority endorsement of Clinton's candidacy; Democrats by a 12-point margin would rather see Obama as the nominee, a lead that's held steadily in ABC News/Washington Post polls since early March. Instead it reflects a rejection of the notion that the drawn-out contest will hurt the party's prospects. Seventy-one percent think it'll either make no difference in November (56 percent) or actually help the party (15 percent).
A copy of the questionnaire can be found here in PDF form.
In breaking down the results, many explanations are offered, from the hope that perhaps there will be some sort of "reunification" of the party at the end of the primary race to the prospect of an Obama/Clinton ticket for the November ballot, putting Clinton in the VP slot for the Obama candidacy.
Perhaps there is another reason, unspoken by the pollsters at ABC, for the reason so many Democrats think that Hillary should stay in the race. Perhaps there is the slip possibility that in light of the negative attention Obama has had to contend with and his difficulties in handling controversy and criticism, some have changed their minds about whom they wish they had voted for.
Off target? I don't think so. In my daily life I'm surrounded by "yellow-dog" Democrats (a term given to Democrats who would vote for a yellow dog over a republican if the yellow dog was their only other choice). The comment was made to me this very weekend, during some Obama fawning telecast by one of the Big Three dinosaurs (I think it WAS CBS) that the American democrats may have made a big mistake and put the wrong one up as the front runner. This was said to me by someone who has been, thus far, a staunch Obamite. I was amazed, and asked for expansion upon that notion. The explanation was astounding for me to hear, and that was that Obama wasn't coming across as brilliantly as he did in the early days of his candidacy, and if he couldn't take the pressure from the Clinton machine how was he going to be able to handle the pressure of being President? The others around who heard this nodded their heads in agreement (mind you, I was the "token" republican in the group).
John McCain pulled a spectacular coup off in gaining the top spot for the republican nomination. At points during the primary race, he suffered polling numbers that dipped nearly into the single digit category of other contenders such as Ron Paul, but managed to defeat all other comers and emerge as the last man standing.
Given this recent ABC poll, could Hillary Clinton be possibly clutching the ears of her own rabbit deep inside the magician's hat as well?
