Text size:

Polls: Obama makes inroads with Clinton voters

BY NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON | nia.henderson@newsday.com

September 3, 2008

CHICAGO - As Barack Obama prepares to resume campaigning today, polls show that he has made inroads with former Hillary Rodham Clinton backers and hit the 50 percent support mark among registered voters for the first time.

It's a typical post-convention bounce that Obama will be looking to sustain as he travels to Ohio today and Pennsylvania tomorrow.

According to a Gallup daily tracking poll released yesterday, 81 percent of Clinton supporters say they will back Obama, up from 70 percent before the convention. Sixty-five percent of those voters are certain they will vote for the Illinois senator, up from 47 percent. And 12 percent of former Clinton voters said they planned to vote for John McCain, a 4 percent drop. Obama also saw gains in voter confidence on handling terrorism and Iraq, and being a strong and decisive leader.

The shift in support among Clinton voters comes after the junior senator from New York and her husband played key roles at the Democratic National Convention, rousing the faithful with prime-time speeches that left the Obama campaign with clips that could be used in commercials, aides said.

And on the trail, Obama has said Clinton "rocked the house" and he has repeatedly expressed his support for equal pay for equal work, invoking his two young daughters.

"We are not surprised," said Linda Douglass, Obama spokeswoman. "We knew that once Senator Obama was able to make the stark contrast between his policies and John McCain's that her supporters would come into the fold." Douglass said that Clinton will be a very important player in the campaign.

The inroads are a start, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women at Rutgers University, but there is more work to do.

"He needs to keep speaking to the issues that are important to women; many are living paycheck to paycheck. He needs to speak about economic issues if they want to solidify that vote," Walsh said. "It can't be we send Senator Clinton out to do that, she opened the door, but then he has to go through that door."

Walsh said that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's place on the Republican ticket likely hasn't scrambled the decks, as the McCain campaign had hoped, given that women tend to lean Democratic.

The Obama campaign has signaled that it will run against her by linking her to McCain, whom they have repeatedly linked to Bush.

To that end, they released an ad yesterday called "The Same," which features the Arizona senator saying that he voted with Bush "over 90 percent of the time, higher than a lot of my ... Republican colleagues."