Frank Newport from Gallup reports on USA Today’s blog the results from polling data he collected between September 14 and September 16. The results are these:
Hillary Clinton 47
Barack Obama 25
John Edwards 11
Bill Richardson 5
Joe Biden 3
Dennis Kucinich 2
Chris Dodd 1
Mike Gravel 1
Newport observes that Edwards has dropped to his lowest point in the polls since March when he was at 10 percent. It is perhaps notable that Hillary at 47 has more than Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Biden, and Kucinich combined (46%).
Newport suggests that Hillary’s nomination may be nearly inevitable unless she stumbles badly:
One of the biggest factors that could affect the race would be a major Hillary Clinton gaffe, or some type of Hillary implosion in Iowa or New Hampshire. But one would have to assign a fairly low probability at this point to the chances of any one other than Clinton ending up with the party nomination.
There have been a lot of comparisons with historical circumstances to suggest that Hillary’s lead is ephemeral, and we can anticipate, based on history, that she will fail in her quest. Newport provides a summary of recent parallels:
A Sept 13-15 1991 Gallup poll showed the following standings for the Democratic candidates:
Mario Cuomo 31%
Jesse Jackson 14%
Jerry Brown 11%
Tom Harkin 5%
Douglas Wilder 4%
Bob Kerrey 4%
Bill Clinton 3%
Well, what happened? The biggest change was the December 1991 decision by New York Governor Mario Cuomo not to run for his party’s nomination. That opened everything up. Bill Clinton went from 6% in a late October, early November Gallup poll (with Cuomo included) to 17% (just behind Jerry Brown) in a Jan 3-9 Gallup poll (with Cuomo not included).
Newport observes it is unlikely that Hillary will withdraw from the race. I concur. He also points to the 2004 race, a precedent frequently cited here on Big Orange:
In 2003, by the way, while John Kerry was not technically the front runner in September, he was close. A Sept. 8-10 Gallup poll showed this:
Dick Gephardt 15%
Howard Dean 13%
Joe Lieberman 12%
John Kerry 11%
The trajectory of the 2004 Democratic race showed Wesley Clark charging a little in late September, then a major Dean surge late in the year, then the famous Dean implosion, and then Kerry running away with the nomination by late January.
But there was no prohibitive front runner who stayed in, as presumablyl will be the case for Hillary Clinton today.
The one bit of hope for the other candidates that he holds out, at least as historical precedent, is what happened in 1976:
In the fall of 1975, Jimmy Carter had an amazing 1% of the vote in our Gallup polling, putting him behind at least 7 other Democratic candidates . . . . There was a new primary system in place that year, however, and Carter seemed to be most shrewdly aware of how to take advantage of it. He did well in early primaries, others faltered, and the rest is history.
I thought his analysis was quite interesting, and I decided people might like to know what Newport is thinking this morning.
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