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Columbia, S.C. -- Barack Obama is heading into the January 26 South Carolina Democratic primary powered by a solid lead in each of the most recent 11 polls taken here, with African American voters and a slice of the white electorate set to put him over the top next Saturday.
While Obama is expected to pick up one out of five white Democratic primary voters, his margin among such voters in this deep Southern state lags from three to fourteen percentage points behind his support among whites nationally, depending on the survey. This lag, which appears at present to hold across the entire South, challenges one of the central claims of the Obama campaign: that he is a more viable general election candidate than Hillary Clinton.
Additional poll data from Mason-Dixon and SurveyUSA studies also produce findings which run counter to the hopes and expectations of many of Obama's supporters here in South Carolina.
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If, as a number of Democratic strategists argue, the party were to write off the states of the deep South and limit efforts in the region to Florida and perhaps some states on the periphery such as Arkansas and Tennessee, Obama's apparent difficulties with white Democrats -- ranging from slight to very substantial -- would not be a significant factor in the general election. Instead, his strength with independent whites outside the South could prove to be a more important matter in assessing his viability in November.
There are a number of signals pointing to difficulties for Obama in the South.
In national surveys of white voters, conducted by television networks and newspapers, Obama has generally run ahead of John Edwards and behind Hillary Clinton. In the South, however, Edwards has run consistently ahead of Obama among whites.
Confirming Obama's relative vulnerability in the South is MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, one of the nation's leading experts on public opinion surveys who has helped coordinate a huge academically-based data collection program, including 10,000 interviews conducted in December. He found that "Obama comes in third among the white southern Democrats. Clinton gets 36 percent, Edwards 24 percent and Obama 17 percent." This amounts to a 19 point spread between Clinton and Obama, and a significant 7 point spread between Edwards and Obama.
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More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/19/obama-faces-white-resista_n_82300.htmlStatistics makes my head hurt.
:banghead: