Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Eek!

This doesn't bode well for Obama: in Massachusetts, Barack Obama would lose to John McCain. MASSACHUSETTS! As I've said over at BMG a few times, and perhaps here, Clinton outperforms Obama among Democrats, while Obama has relied on Independents to overcome the fact that he loses the Democratic vote to his rivals. Clearly, I'm not alone in thinking Obama isn't exactly a proud Democrat - he turns off a lot of voters, even more so than Hillary.

In what shouldn't exactly be the shocker of shockers, given the previous two sentences, Barack Obama doesn't fare well against John McCain, who also appeals to Independents. In the poll, Hillary beat McCain by a 4% margin. Obama would lose by 5% - that's a 9% swing, folks. Glaringly missing in the survey is the fact that John Edwards isn't included. However, in matchups from other surveys, John Edwards consistently performs best among Democrats versus John McCain.

For years on this blog, I've been telling people to not vote based on their gut feelings of who they think is most electable. Barack Obama may appeal toward broader coalitions in Democratic Primaries, but those people clearly don't necessarily follow him over to the general election. They also don't vote as much. We can't take chances in '08, so people ought to be very careful about voting for Obama. He's not the best candidate out there by any measure.

Hat tip to Susan at Below Boston, who's the best Mass Blogger on the POTUS scene.

Update: Here's one of the reasons why I say Susan's election coverage has been the best. Read her comment on that blog, too.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If John McCain won the presidency, how upset would you be on a scale of 1-10, 1 being okay with it, 10 being OH NOEEES!

And I'm asking this 100% dead seriously.

Ryan said...

Probably an 8 or 9.

I don't think McCain would be disastrious, a la Bush, but he's not going to do enough (anything?) to get our troops out of Iraq... and he's certainly not going to allow the implimentation of serious progressive reform. Meanwhile, people are losing jobs and dying from diseases that decent health care would have prevented. McCain represents a serious opportunity cost - there are just better people we could have in office.

Peter Porcupine said...

Ryan - I don't know why this is so, but Mass. has ALWAYS had a soft spot for McCain. He TOTALLY swept the GOP primary here in 2000 and like NH, Mass. has more independents than anyone else in either pary.

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