While polling in Texas over the past few days has shown a consistently small edge for Senator Barack Obama in tomorrow’s primaries, the polls in Ohio remain irritatingly inconsistent, thereby throwing a monkeywrench into my colleague James Joyner’s record of successful primary predictions via his “going by what the polls say” strategy.
One Ohio poll shows that Senator Hillary Clinton leads Obama in Ohio by a whopping nine points.
Clinton receives support from 51 percent of probable Ohio Democratic primary voters while Barack Obama has the support of 42 percent of the same group, according to a new Ohio Poll released Monday (.pdf). The poll, conducted between Feb. 28 and March 2, shows Clinton increasing her support in Ohio since the previous poll a week ago, which showed her leading Obama 47-39.
Today’s Quinnipiac university poll, on the other hand, shows a mere 4 point lead for Clinton, which is just outside the margin of error of 3.5 percent.
Today’s Zogby poll is the outlier here, showing that Sen. Obama has taken a slight lead of 2 points in the Ohio contest.
I think that, at this point, the odds are pretty good that Obama is going to (narrowly) take Texas in the primary (but my guess is he’ll win big in the caucusing portion of the Texas race). Ohio is anyone’s guess, as you can see above. Still, the polls seem to be more or less showing a consistent small lead for Clinton–even the Zogby poll showing an Obama lead is within the margin of error–and I suspect that she’ll win there. Still, a loss in Texas and a minor win in Ohio is hardly comforting news for the Clinton campaign. Whether they would still go on to other primaries after that is anybody’s guess.
