An extensive Public Policy Institute poll finds that Obama has increased his lead across all demographic groups in California. The actual survey in .pdf is here.
First, the top line numbers:
Obama 54
McCain 37
Clinton 51
McCain 39
Notably, Hillary Clinton now has a 51% unfavorable rating in California and a 46% favorable. Obama? 59-36 favorable-unfavorable. McCain's at 42-53. It's difficult to see how he can put California in play.
But we know California is a safe Obama state. The more interesting data point concerns Obama's gains with Latinos. Among this subset, Obama's favorables are 68-25, compared to Clinton's 72-24 and McCain's 38-53. And though Obama got clobbered by Clinton among Latinos, he's beating McCain by a 69-20 spread among Latinos, which is just a hair under Clinton's 74-16 spread against McCain with the same group. This data shows that (1) Obama can make inroads among key demographics that favored Clinton in the primaries (as most of us understand, just because certain groups preferred Clinton in the primaries does not mean they are necessarily going to drift to McCain in November); (2) Latinos in California (and likely across the country) have shown no indication that they will categorically vote for the white candidate over an African-American.
From Super Tuesday to the Texas Primacaucuses, the media beat the drums of Obama's "Latino problem" (which has now transmuted into his "hardworking white Americans problem" as the calendar changed). A few months later, poll after poll show that Obama doesn't have a "Latino problem" at all, and in fact is showing strength in heavily Latino Southwestern states. In a "big state" that Clinton won, Obama is now much stronger, performing better against McCain among whites and nearing matching her spread against McCain among Latinos.
As the general election begins in earnest, I expect more polls that will confirm that "Obama's Latino problem" was in fact just another media-created myth.