Posted by Jed Lewison on Wed May 28, 2008 at 12:03 PM Pacific

Let's look at every poll

A certain presidential candidate is making some rather extravagant claims about leading in every single poll taken here on planet earth, so let's just look at the numbers.

This chart shows, by month, the average net margin of victory or defeat for Obama and Clinton versus McCain. It relies on every single poll aggregated by pollster.com except for those polls in which only one candidate appeared. In other words, this is a true apples-to-apples test.

As you can see, even though Hillary Clinton has made significant strides relative to Obama, he still outperforms her on average. Sure, you can cherry pick whatever results Karl Rove may want by taking a selective look at state-by-state polling, but there's no ambiguity: Hillary Clinton does not do any better than Barack Obama versus John McCain.

It's also worth noting that one of the reasons for the tightening is that since March, the GOP attack machine has focused almost exclusively on Barack Obama. Simultaneously, he's faced withering attacks from Hillary Clinton and had to deal with two Jeremiah Wright flareups, not to mention ABC's assault on his patriotism. And yet he's still more than held his own.

Let's look at every poll

A certain presidential candidate is making some rather extravagant claims about leading in every single poll taken here on planet earth, so let's just look at the numbers.

This chart shows, by month, the average net margin of victory or defeat for Obama and Clinton versus McCain. It relies on every single poll aggregated by pollster.com except for those polls in which only one candidate appeared. In other words, this is a true apples-to-apples test.

As you can see, even though Hillary Clinton has made significant strides relative to Obama, he still outperforms her on average. Sure, you can cherry pick whatever results Karl Rove may want by taking a selective look at state-by-state polling, but there's no ambiguity: Hillary Clinton does not do any better than Barack Obama versus John McCain.

It's also worth noting that one of the reasons for the tightening is that since March, the GOP attack machine has focused almost exclusively on Barack Obama. Simultaneously, he's faced withering attacks from Hillary Clinton and had to deal with two Jeremiah Wright flareups, not to mention ABC's assault on his patriotism. And yet he's still more than held his own.

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