I have seen a lot of people here on DU saying that only Hillary can win in November and so if Obama were to be the nominee, we would be "SCREWN" (i.e. John McCain would cruise to an easy victory).
I have been looking in various places for recent polls that compare how Obama and Hillary would perform in the general election against John McCain. The only updated polls I could find are the polls from Washington Post-ABC News. The pattern since Feb 5th is very interesting.
Around 4 weeks ago (Late-January), Obama was beating McCain by up to 3 points. Hillary was losing to McCain by up to 3 points. So it was looking like only Obama could beat McCain!
But now, Obama beats McCain by 11 points, and Hillary is statistically tied with McCain at +3. So maybe Obama is the strongest candidate to go up against John McCain?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_030308.htmlThis information has been posted here already during the past few minutes but still a lot of folks seem to believe that Obama cannot beat McCain. So the point of this thread is to let folks know that Obama's numbers have been improving over recent days, leading up to March 4th.
I know Obama has more pledged delegates and it's very hard to see how Hillary could catch him. But the fact is that neither can become the nominee without the support of superdelegates. I expect that the SDs will take a number of factors into consideration, including the results of national opinion polls.
It will be interesting to see the results of polls done after March 5th. If Obama's numbers continue to improve, it will undermine Hillary's claim that she is the most electable candidate.