Blog P.I.

Chris Bowers of MyDD jump-started some of my thinking on whether or not Hillary vs. Obama poll numbers have any inherent biases built into them, but Mark Blumenthal ends that discussion here with some smart analysis that suggests there is no difference between national surveys of so-called Dem primary voters.

Bowers postulated that the screens were not tight enough and Hillary had a name ID advantage that was explaining her lead. I believed some version of that for a while as well, but those numbers suggest to me that something very different is happening in the Democratic primary race.

Look at the chart Blumenthal produces:

That Mark Mellman poll piqued my interest.

One of the reason we hacks so trust our pollsters is they use better methods than the (cheap) traditional media outlets use. Mellman’s poll uses a registration-based screen with voter history as a leading indicator of primary participation. Translated into English: He bought a voter file and called people who vote in primaries. That’s significantly more expensive to do, but provides much more valuable information.

So, here’s your resident Dem hack’s analysis of those numbers.

Hillary Clinton has a big-time base of support. She has 38% of the electorate — an electorate that is closely watching this race so far and has not decided to leave her. Edwards and Obama both have 77% name ID in this poll to Clinton’s 96%. That’s low, but couldn’t possibly account for her entire lead, and let me quibble with one point of analysis from their own page:

…Obama and Edwards are more popular among Democratic primary voters who know them.

Yeah, no shit. Your supporters tend to know who you are. It’s a common misconception in polling analysis that the uniformed portion of a poll acts like the informed portion.

Either way, I would think the Obama and Edwards teams need to face a hard fact: primary Dems know Hillary and they’re sticking with her right now. They will need to start identifying ways to peel off those voters if they want to win.

38% of the vote in a six-way primary is a massive amount of support and I won’t even get into an analysis of HRC’s favorables in this poll (they’re good) because it would take me another three paragraphs I don’t feel like writing that much.

But… HRC hasn’t locked this up by any means. It’s significant that 62% of Dems choose someone else and when there are fewer candidates to choose from, they’ll undoubtedly consolidate.

But the media don’t report like that; they only crown winners. In a front-loaded primary, people who look like they’re going to win generally get votes. It won’t be hard for HRC to start rolling through if she can emerge from IA, NH, NV, SC with a couple wins.

That makes those states do or die for Edwards and Obama. They need to shake up Hillary’s base.