Opinion: Hillary Highs

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Hillary Clinton has two reasons to glow today: strong pundit reviews for her performance at Thursday’s candidate forum on African-American issues, and new Gallup poll results showing big support for her among Democratic and Democratic-leaning black and Latino voters.

The reviews: ‘First Place . . . looked like she was in charge,’’ wrote Roger Simon on politico.com. Clinton ‘spoke with greater confidence on race issues’’ than did Barack Obama, wrote Mary Mitchell in the Chicago Sun-Times. ‘Clinton and [John] Edwards were very good, Obama more spotty but better as time went on,’ blogged Rick Klein of ABC’s The Note.

The poll numbers: Clinton ‘easily has the highest favorable ratings among blacks and Hispanics,’ said Gallup in releasing its new results Friday. Some 84% of blacks and 63% of Hispanics in the survey had a favorable impression of Clinton.

Obama, by contrast, was viewed favorably by 68% of blacks and 33% of Hispanics (with more than half of all Hispanics saying they did not know enough about him to form an opinion).

There are even more interesting numbers -- and a possible signal to Obama -- in a separate Gallup poll released Wednesday.

With Al Gore in the mix, Obama had the support of 40% of black respondents, compared with 37% for Clinton (the gap lies within the poll’s margin of error, which statistically makes them tied), with 9% for Gore and 3% for Edwards.

But, note well: without Gore in the mix, Clinton was tops among the black respondents with 43%, compared to 42% for Obama and 6% for Edwards. Which means that some black voters ranked Obama no higher than their third choice.

The fight for African American voters -- a key part of the Democratic base -- continues.

--Scott Martelle