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Hillary Clinton wins to Obama in Pennslvania

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama can both find something to like in a new Quinnipiac University poll that finds she might have stopped the hemorrhaging and that his own wounds might not be as severe as feared.

Democratic Party leaders, on the other hand, might not be as overjoyed by results that suggest the dragged-out primary fight for the Democratic presidential nomination could prove costly to the party in November. Nearly one-fifth of Obama supporters say they will vote for Republican John McCain rather than Clinton if she is the nominee, and more than one-quarter of her supporters say they will vote for the Republican if Obama gets the nomination.

The survey out this morning finds that Clinton has stalled the Illinois senator’s momentum that closed a double-digit gap to within six percentage points, with the Democratic presidential race in Pennsylvania exactly where it was a week ago.

Clinton maintains a 50 percent to 44 percent lead, according to the survey of 2,103 likely voters in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary a week away.”Sen. Hillary Clinton is fighting off Sen. Barack Obama’s drive to make it a close race in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, holding the six-point edge she had a week ago. She seems to have halted the erosion of whites and white women in particular from her campaign,” said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

But Obama can find comfort that this latest poll shows little indication that the controversy over his remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians is taking as big a toll as feared.

His comments that these people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” has dominated the race and worried his campaign aides since Friday as the two candidates reach out to working-class voters.

Yet the full impact — if any — of the controversy on Obama and Clinton’s support wasn’t measured by the poll, which doesn’t ask voters about the issue. The survey also includes only two days — Saturday and Sunday — of polling after news broke of his April 6 remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser.

Richards said it would take longer for the issue to resonate before any impact could be felt.

The poll also came before Clinton released a new television ad late Monday to drive home the issue with voters who might not yet have heard about it. Political experts are divided over whether criticism by her and McCain over what they call Obama’s “elite” comments will hurt his support with voters or whether their efforts will backfire.

The survey, which has a 2.1 percent margin of error, found that Clinton has shored up some of her support with critical demographics such as in the Philadelphia suburbs. She has come from 11 points down a week ago to 2 points behind in the poll conducted April 9-13.