The first significant poll since the flap over Barack Obama's former pastor erupted this month shows the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comments have not damaged Obama's prospects to take the Democratic nomination.
His opponent Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, sees her highest negative ratings yet in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday. The two candidates remain tied among voters.
Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC polls with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, called the latest poll a "myth-buster" that showed the pastor controversy is "not the beginning of the end for the Obama campaign."
But both Democrats, and especially New York's Sen. Clinton, are showing wounds from their prolonged and increasingly bitter nomination contest, which could weaken the ultimate nominee for the general-election showdown against Sen. McCain of Arizona. Even among women, who are the base of Sen. Clinton's support, she now is viewed negatively by more voters than positively for the first time in a Journal/NBC poll.
The latest survey has the Democratic rivals in a dead heat, each with 45% support from registered Democratic voters. That is a slight improvement for Sen. Obama, though a statistically insignificant one, from the last Journal/NBC poll, two weeks ago, which had Sen. Clinton leading among Democratic voters, 47% to 43%.
While Sen. Clinton still leads among white Democrats, her edge shrank to eight points (49% to 41%) from 12 points in early March (51% to 39%). That seems to refute widespread speculation -- and fears among Sen. Obama's backers -- that he would lose white support for his bid to be the nation's first African-American president over the controversy surrounding his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. of Chicago.
NBC political director Chuck Todd offers his observations on the poll:
As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it's not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37% positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.
The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday this week by Hart-McInturff and surveyed 700 registered voters, which gives the poll a margin of error of +/- 3.7%. In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race and overall response to last week's Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.
On that issue specifically, 32% of folks said he "sufficiently addressed the issue," while 26% of those folks believe he needs to address the Wright controversy further; 31% of voters surveyed did not see the speech or had no opinion. Interestingly, of those voters who said they saw the speech, 47% said Obama sufficiently addressed the Wright issue while 37% said he needs to address it further. Among whites, 45% were satisfied with Obama's explanation, 38% were not; Among blacks, 67% said the speech was sufficient while 25% want him to address it further.
Overall, 55% of voters told us that they were "disturbed" by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos that circulated so widely on cable TV and the Internet.
The first significant poll since the flap over Barack Obama's former pastor erupted this month shows the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comments have not damaged Obama's prospects to take the Democratic nomination.