Opinion: Clinton has room to give
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The problem with polls at this stage of a campaign is that the election is still so far away most people haven’t been paying much attention. You get the call from the pollster and decide you’ll humor the poor guy and answer his questions, even though you’ve been more interested in the baseball playoff picture and the start of the school year, so you just say, ‘Yeah, sure, that one -- Hillary Clinton? Yeah, her,’ as you think to yourself, ‘Y’know, my dinner’s getting cold, let’s wrap this up.’
So the better-known a candidate is, the better the candidate fares in these early polls. Still, people like us watch the polls to see if anyone’s getting much motion. Fred Thompson goes up. Bill Richardson sees a few more points here and there. John McCain bounces up and down. We duly note it all.
But Roger Simon points out over at Politico.com that all this poll-watching misses the forest for the trees. And the forest at this point is that Clinton has maintained a substantial lead over her rivals for months now, raising the question: Can anyone stop her? Polls tracked at RealClearPolitics.com show...
‘Hillary ahead of Obama by an average of 19.6 percentage points in February. Today, it shows her ahead of Obama by an average of 19.4 percentage points. That’s not much slippage after seven months of campaigning. And Hillary’s average lead over John Edwards started out at 25.8 percentage points in February and is at an average of 28 percentage points today. It will be extremely difficult for Hillary to maintain such a huge lead all the way to the beginning of the primary season — polls almost always narrow — but she has a lot of ground she can give away and still be a prohibitive front-runner.’
And she’s doing well in the three main early primary states as well, Simon says. So the question: Who can stop her, and how? Post away in the comments section below, but please be specific; none of this ‘my candidate can do it because he/she is way cooler’ stuff. What specifically will it take for one of the other contenders to overtake Clinton? How does a candidate move ahead on the inside rail in this particular horse race?
-- Scott Martelle