Obama Visit Coming to Jacksonville.

[gopman369]

Obama is making a fundraising stop in Jacksonville on Friday, June 20th at the Prome Osborne. General seating at the reception is $500/person and VIP seating is $2300/person, standard rates for a political fundraiser. There have been discussions about providing for a "General Admission" that would not include the sit down event, but would probably get the ticket holder entrance to the venue. No word yet on if the General Admission will actually happen, but there has been pressure from the local party office to allow more of the general public attend the event.

What a tremendous waste of money.  You would be better off doing this with it:

now that was awesome.  hilarious!  but so true!

[RiversideGator]

Looks like Obama is too liberal for even some Democrat Congressmen:

Okla. Dem calls Obama liberal, declines to endorse

    OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) â€" Democratic Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma said Tuesday Barack Obama is "the most liberal senator" in Congress and he has no intention of endorsing him for the White House.

    However, Boren will vote for Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August and will vote Democratic on Nov. 4.

    "I think this is an important time for our country," Boren said in a telephone interview. "We're facing a terrible economic downturn. We have high gasoline prices. We have problems in our foreign policy. That's why I think it's important."

    Boren, the lone Democrat in Oklahoma's congressional delegate, said that while Obama has talked about working with Republicans, "unfortunately, his record does not reflect working in a bipartisan fashion."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jPG6u74pnrtTlz9Fs6pexEYSfdGAD917CV983

[vicupstate]

I don't consider FL to be in play in the general election, at least not at the moment.  Unless Bob Graham or some other Floridian is put in as VP, that isn't TOO likely to change.   

There are too many people there that are McCain's age.  That said, Obama will run a 50-state campaign, and it has been close in the last two elections, so it could tighten up some, but probably not enough.

In other states the shift of voters from GOP to Dem is well documented.  The northern suburbs (Philly, DC, etc.) being prime examples. 

I thought this long but interesting article from a conservative news source was quite appropriate to this thread.   Stephen isn't the only conservative not blindly following the Bush dogma.

Mr. Right?
The rise of the Obamacons.

Bruce Bartlett,  The New Republic  Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008


The New Yorker is hardly the optimal vehicle for reaching the conservative intelligentsia. But, last year, Barack Obama cooperated with a profile for that magazine where he seemed to be speaking directly to the right. Because he paid obeisance to the virtues of stability and continuity, his interlocutor, Larissa MacFarquhar, came away with the impression that the Illinois senator was an adherent of Edmund Burke: "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative."

As The New Yorker's assessment shot across blogs, many conservatives listened eagerly. A broad swath of the movement has been in open revolt against George W. Bush--and the Republican Party establishment--for some time. They don't much care for the Iraq war or the federal government's vast expansion over the last seven-and-a-half years. And, in the eyes of these discontents, the nomination of John McCain only confirmed the continuation of the worst of the Bush-era deviations from first principles.

But it was hardly inevitable that this revolt would translate into enthusiasm for the Democratic standard-bearer. After all, you could see similar signs of unhappiness four years ago, and none of that translated into mass defections to the John Kerry camp. And, despite Ann Coulter's vow to campaign for Hillary Clinton over John McCain, the old bête noir of the right would have never attracted many conservatives. That's what makes the rise of the Obamacons such an interesting development. Conservatives of almost all ideological flavors (even, gasp, some supply-siders) have been drawn to Obama--out of a genuine affection and a belief that he may actually better embody movement ideals than McCain.

There have been a few celebrated cases of conservatives endorsing Obama, like the blogger Andrew Sullivan and the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec. But you probably have not have heard of many of the Obamacons--and neither has the Obama campaign. When I checked with it to ask for a list of prominent conservative supporters, the campaign seemed genuinely unaware that such supporters even existed. But those of us on the right who pay attention to think tanks, blogs, and little magazines have watched Obama compile a coterie drawn from the movement's most stalwart and impressive thinkers. It's a group that will no doubt grow even larger in the coming months.

The largest group of Obamacons hail from the libertarian wing of the movement. And it's not just Andrew Sullivan. Milton and Rose Friedman's son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father's cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama's sympathy for school vouchers--a tendency that the Democratic primaries temporarily suppressed. Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications--the company that owns The Orange County Register--told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.

Libertarians (and other varieties of Obamacons, for that matter) frequently find themselves attracted to Obama on stylistic grounds. That is, they believe that he has surrounded himself with pragmatists, some of whom (significantly) come from the University of Chicago. As the blogger Megan McArdle has written, "His goal is not more government so that we can all be caught up in some giant, expressive exercise of collectively enforcing our collective will on all the other people standing around us in the collective; his goal is improving transparency and minimizing government intrusion while rectifying specific outcomes."

In nearly every quarter of the movement, you can find conservatives irate over the Iraq war--a war they believe transgresses core principles. And it's this frustration with the war--and McCain's pronouncements about victory at any cost--that has led many conservatives into Obama's arms. Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative theorist, recently told an Australian journalist that he would reluctantly vote for Obama to hold the Republican Party accountable "for a big policy failure" in Iraq. And he seems to view Obama as the best means for preserving American power, since Obama "symbolizes the ability of the United States to renew itself in a very unexpected way."

You can find similar sentiments coursing through the Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich's seminal Obamacon manifesto in The American Conservative. He believes that the war in Iraq has undermined the possibilities for conservative reform at home. The prospects for a conservative revival, therefore, depend on withdrawing from Iraq. Thus the necessity of Obama. "For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one," Bacevich concludes.

How substantial is the Obamacon phenomenon? Well, it has even penetrated National Review, the intellectual anchor of the conservative movement. There's Jeffrey Hart, who has been a senior editor at the magazine since 1968 and even wrote a history of the magazine, The Making of the American Conservative Mind; and Wick Allison, who once served as the magazine's publisher.

Neither man has renounced his conservatism. Both have come away impressed by Obama's rhetorical acumen. This is a particular compliment coming from Hart, who wrote speeches for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. They both like that Obama couches his speeches in a language of uplift and unity. When describing his support for Obama, Allison pointed me in the direction of a column that his wife (who has never supported a Democrat) wrote in The Dallas Morning News: "He speaks with candor and elegance against the kind of politics that have become so dispiriting and for the kind of America I would like to see. As a man, I find Mr. Obama to be prudent, thoughtful, and courageous. His life story embodies the conservative values that go to the core of my beliefs."

But, if you're looking for the least likely pool of Obamacons, it would be the supply-siders. And you can even find some of those. Take Larry Hunter, who helped put together the economics passages in the Contract with America and served as chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He concedes that Obama is saying the wrong things on taxes but dismisses it as electioneering. Of far greater importance, in Hunter's view, is that Obama has the potential to "scramble the political deck, break up old alliances, and bring odd bedfellows together in a new coalition." And, what's more important, he views the Republican Party as a "dead, rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of Weekend at Bernie's, handcuffed to a corpse." Unless the Republican Party is thoroughly purged of its current leadership, Hunter fears that it "will pollute the political environment to toxic levels and create an epidemic that could damage the country for generations to come."

I know what Hunter and the rest of the Obamacons are talking about. As a conservative, I share their disgust with a Republican Party that still does not see how badly George W. Bush has misgoverned this country. But, while I am sympathetic to the Obamacons and have a number of friends that are, I am not one of them. I'm not ready to join the other side.

Still, I have enjoyed watching the phenomenon, which has the potential to remake the political landscape. It will also produce some of the good comedy that inevitably accompanies strange bedfellows. The blogger Dorothy King, an archeologist and strong conservative, recently outed herself as an Obamacon. This was a culturally awkward position for her. She wondered, "Do I now, as a newly minted Obamaphile liberal elitist, have to serve my guests Chablis? Or would any old chardonnay do? ... Am I even meant to admit to going to the supermarket? Should I pretend to only go to the local Farmers' Market?" There, undoubtedly, will be much more of such dislocation in the months to come.

Bruce Bartlett is the author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

[RiversideGator]

A few apostate conservatives and liberal Republican turncoats do not make a movement.  Show me some actual poll numbers where this is happening in large numbers.  The last poll I saw on the issue showed more Dems supporting McCain than Reps supporting Obama. 

Also, there is the not insignificant matter of Jewish voters not supporting Obama to the traditional degree that they normally support Dem candidates:

Doing it at the AIPAC meeting enabled McCain to sow further doubts about Obama among Jewish voters. Jews vote heavily Democratic as a rule; exit polls show that John Kerry won 76 percent of the Jewish vote in 2004 and Al Gore won 79 percent in 2000.

But Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, has had problems with Jewish voters, routinely losing them by wide margins to rival Hillary Clinton. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Clinton won more than 60 percent of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls. A recent Gallup poll found Obama leading McCain among Jews by 61 percent to 32 percent, well below the Democratic norm.

Miami Herald, Tue, Jun. 03, 2008
http://www.miamiherald.com/campaign08/story/555866.html

[vicupstate]

Looks like Obama is too liberal for even some Democrat Congressmen:

Okla. Dem calls Obama liberal, declines to endorse

    OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) â€" Democratic Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma said Tuesday Barack Obama is "the most liberal senator" in Congress and he has no intention of endorsing him for the White House.

    However, Boren will vote for Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August and will vote Democratic on Nov. 4.

    "I think this is an important time for our country," Boren said in a telephone interview. "We're facing a terrible economic downturn. We have high gasoline prices. We have problems in our foreign policy. That's why I think it's important."

    Boren, the lone Democrat in Oklahoma's congressional delegate, said that while Obama has talked about working with Republicans, "unfortunately, his record does not reflect working in a bipartisan fashion."

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jPG6u74pnrtTlz9Fs6pexEYSfdGAD917CV983

14 GOP Congressmen don't sem too happy with McCain either.

New Gang of 14 won’t back McCain 
By Kristen Coulter and Bob Cusack 
Posted: 06/11/08 07:48 PM [ET] 
At least 14 Republican members of Congress have refused to endorse or publicly support Sen. John McCain for president, and more than a dozen others declined to answer whether they back the Arizona senator.


Many of the recalcitrant GOP members declined to detail their reasons for withholding support, but Rep. John Peterson (R-Pa.) expressed major concerns about McCain’s energy policies and Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) cited the Iraq war.



A handful of other Republicans on Capitol Hill made the distinction between “endorsing” and “supporting,” adding that while they have not endorsed, they do support McCain.


In recent weeks, much of the discussion and debate about party unity has been on the Democrats’ side, amid their protracted presidential primary. Yet achieving harmony is a concern on both sides of the aisle this year.


It is not unusual for certain factions of the Democratic and Republican parties not to embrace their respective candidates for president. McCain’s campaign seized on some Democrats’ reticence about Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), issuing a release on Tuesday that highlighted that Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) is not endorsing the presumptive nominee. While some conservative Democrats have yet to endorse Obama and didn’t back Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004, there are both centrist and conservative Republicans representing various parts of the country who are not embracing McCain.


Republican members who have not endorsed or publicly backed McCain include Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and Reps. Jones, Peterson, John Doolittle (Calif.), Randy Forbes (Va.), Wayne Gilchrest (Md.), Virgil Goode (Va.), Tim Murphy (Pa.), Ron Paul (Texas), Ted Poe (Texas), Todd Tiahrt (Kan.), Dave Weldon (Fla.) and Frank Wolf (Va.). [Wolf contacted The Hill following publication of the article to correct his staff’s error. His staff had said he has “yet to endorse McCain” and did not return follow-up phone calls this week].

[RiversideGator]

Again, show me poll numbers.  Otherwise, this is meaningless argument by anecdotal evidence.

[RiversideGator]

Speaking of anecdotal evidence, a Clinton delegate to the Dem convention has now endorsed McCain.  Wow.  Read more here:

Delegate’s reversal stuns party
Wisconsin Democrat now publicly supports McCain
By CRAIG GILBERT
cgilbert@journalsentinel.com
Posted: June 14, 2008

Washington - As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton's defeat.

She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama.

And she’s not entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead.

But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.

“I’m sure people are going to be upset with me,” said Bartoshevich, a 41-year-old emergency room nurse from Waterford in Racine County, and convention delegate pledged to Clinton.

Joe Wineke, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, reacted with disbelief when first told Friday afternoon that one of his state party delegates is now a McCain supporter.

“Not a delegate? To the national convention?” said Wineke, who was getting ready for the start of the Wisconsin state party convention Friday in Stevens Point.

“We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she’s voting for John McCain?” Wineke repeated, for clarification. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Wineke said “almost everybody I know who was for Hillary” is solidly behind Obama now. As for Bartoshevich, he said, “my suspicion is she doesn’t know what she’s getting into” because “the delegates to this convention will be very upset.”

Asked if publicly supporting the other party’s presidential nominee could affect a delegate’s convention status, Wineke said, “I never thought I’d ever get a question like this.”

After some preliminary checking, Wineke said he assumed Bartoshevich would remain a delegate.

But Friday night, after a story about Bartoshevich appeared on the Journal Sentinel’s Web site, he had apparently reconsidered. At the state Democratic Party convention, party members, including Clinton supporters, unanimously passed a resolution asking the national party not to seat Bartoshevich at the Denver convention. Wineke spoke in favor of the resolution.

Another pledged Clinton delegate, Paula Dorsey of Milwaukee, offered the resolution.

Dorsey said trying to expel her fellow Democrat from the party’s convention “hurts my soul and it hurts my heart,” but it is the party’s presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), whom convention delegates must support.

An unusual decision

The McCain campaign said that, nationally, it was not aware at this point of any other delegates to the Democratic convention (it may know of an alternate, it said) who have come out for the Republican candidate.

In an interview, Bartoshevich expressed lingering unhappiness over the Democratic nominating process, said Clinton was treated unfairly by the party and said she has deep reservations about Obama’s lack of experience and his judgment.

“I’m kind of disenfranchised,” she said.

She said she planned to vote for Clinton at the convention, but in an Obama-McCain matchup in November, “I will not be voting for Obama. I will cast my vote for John McCain.

“I just feel you need to have somebody who has experience with foreign matters.”

She said a series of controversial Obama associations, including but not limited to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Chicago developer Tony Rezko, reflected poorly on his judgment. And she echoed the complaints of many of Clinton’s most ardent supporters that Clinton was treated unfairly in the nominating process and by the party.

“No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her â€" that’s by Susan B. Anthony,” said Bartoshevich, referring to the suffragist.

Bartoshevich called herself a “devoted Democrat” who had never voted for a Republican for president.

“I’m on a lot of the (pro-Clinton) blogs, and so many people, male and female, feel the same way as I do,” said Bartoshevich, who was listed as a Racine County co-chair for the Clinton campaign and who traveled outside Wisconsin to volunteer for Clinton. “The Democrats jumped on this wagon of Barack Obama, and nobody really knows him.”

Hoping to tap into discontent among Clinton supporters, the McCain campaign is reaching out to them in a variety of ways, including a telephone “town hall” meeting today targeted to non-Republican voters.
McCain aide alerted press

Encouraged by her sister, who has served in Iraq, Bartoshevich signed up as a supporter with “Citizens for McCain,” an arm of the campaign targeting Democrats and independents. She said she got a call from the McCain campaign, which then provided her name to a reporter.

Polls suggest that Democrats are largely rallying around Obama after a divisive nominating fight, a phenomenon that has occurred in past intra-party fights, scholars say. But it remains to be seen whether Obama is hurt in the fall by any softness among Clinton’s core constituencies, especially white women and older and lower-income whites.

“History tells us that the vast majority of pledged (Clinton) delegates will in fact be quite enthusiastic about Obama by the time they get to Denver,” said Elaine Kamarck, a Harvard lecturer, a member of the Democratic National Committee and an expert on the nominating process.

Kamarck, who supported Clinton in the primaries, said it was too soon to tell whether discontent among Clinton supporters becomes a significant factor or “whether it’s just magnified because we have the Internet.”

Clinton has not formally released her pledged delegates, and it would not be unusual, given the modern history of the party, for most of them to cast their votes for Clinton at the convention. But that would depend on whether Clinton allows her name to be put forward for the nomination. Clinton hasn’t made that clear, but she has urged her delegates to help Obama defeat McCain.

Professor Byron Shafer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar who is an expert on conventions, said it’s the fact that Bartoshevich is a convention delegate, subject to the partisan tendencies and pressures common to party activists, that makes her public support for McCain so unusual.

“The competitive partisan dynamic is usually strong enough that even the people not willing to line up at the convention on record for the nominee are still unlikely to be willing to line up publicly for the other party’s nominee,” Shafer said. “It’s a pretty far-out move.”

Steven Walters of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report from Stevens Point.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=762052&format=print

[Driven1]

show us poll numbers.  meaningless speculation by anecdotal evidence otherwise.

[RiversideGator]

I am the only one to show poll numbers.  Specifically, Jewish voters, a traditional Dem voting block, are supporting McCain in higher numbers than usual for a Rep Presidential candidate.

But, for more anecdotal evidence, we have none other than Joe Lieberman, US Democrat Senator and former Democrat VP nominee, supporting McCain for President.  I wonder how much more press there would be if say Cheney had endorsed Obama.  Hmm...  Wonder why...  Read more here:

Lieberman irks Democrats by criticizing Obama

Jun 15, 11:00 AM (ET)

By ANDREW MIGA

WASHINGTON (AP) - Joe Lieberman is fast becoming the Democrats' public enemy No. 1.

The four-term Connecticut senator, who came tantalizingly close to being Al Gore's vice president in 2000, not only has been campaigning for his pal, presumed Republican nominee John McCain, now he's publicly criticizing the Democrats' standard-bearer, Barack Obama. Lieberman has strayed before, most notably switching from Democrat to independent in 2006 to hold onto his Senate seat after a Democratic primary loss.

But the latest betrayal has upset Democrats, who often answer in clipped but polite tones when asked about Lieberman. The reason: The independent still caucuses with the Democrats on most issues except the Iraq war, and he holds their slim political majority in his hands.

"There's a commonly held hope that he's not going to be transformed into an attack dog for Republicans," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., an Obama supporter.

Lieberman has wasted no time in questioning Obama's positions on Iran and Israel, two topics on which Lieberman and McCain agree. Just one day after Obama clinched his party's nomination, Lieberman joined Republicans on a McCain campaign teleconference call assailing Obama following his foreign policy address to a leading Jewish group.

Lieberman accused Obama of blaming U.S. policies for "essentially sort of strengthening" Iran.

"If Israel is in danger today, it's not because of American foreign policy, which has been strongly supportive of Israel in every way," he said. "It is not because of what we have done in Iraq. It is because Iran is a fanatical terrorist, expansionist state."

Later that day, during a budget vote in the Senate, Obama led Lieberman to a corner of the Senate floor for a pointed private conversation. Without elaborating, Obama told reporters the chat was about politics. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had a similar private conversation with Lieberman.

For his part, Lieberman said he assured Obama he would avoid personal attacks.

"I said, and we agreed, that any time I get out there mostly I'm going to be talking positively about John McCain - and anytime I would take issue with Barack Obama, it would never be personal because I have the highest regard for him personally," he said.

Still, Democrats were irked. Lieberman seemed to be breaking new ground - shifting gears from simply promoting McCain to taking shots at Obama.

"I'm glad that Barack Obama had a direct conversation with Joe," Sen. Dick Durbin, Obama's fellow Illinois senator, told reporters. "I hope that Joe will realize that even though he's a friend of John McCain's and feels differently on the war, there are so many other issues Barack stands for that have been a part of Joe's career."

Lieberman's Connecticut colleague, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, said he's heard McCain talk about keeping a civil tone to the campaign.

"It might be a good message for him to convey to his supporters," said Dodd, also an Obama supporter.

Obama had backed Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. After he lost to Ned Lamont, an anti-war candidate, Lieberman defied party leaders and ran as an independent in the general election. Leading Democrats - Obama, Dodd and Kerry among them - then backed Lamont. Lieberman was re-elected with support from the GOP, including praise from the White House and fundraising help from prominent Republicans.

Oddly, Lieberman befriended and dispensed advice to Obama when the Illinois senator arrived in Washington in 2005.

"We have established a very good relationship," Lieberman says. "I have a lot of affection for him."

Call it Lieberman's version of tough love.

The Connecticut lawmaker is willing to speak at the Republican convention this summer if McCain asks. He also has been mentioned as a potential McCain running mate.

Democrats have reason to tolerate Lieberman's actions. If he were to caucus with the GOP, the balance of power in the narrowly divided Senate would slip away, especially with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., battling brain cancer. Democrats need Lieberman to maintain their 51-49 Senate majority.

Beyond Iraq, Lieberman tends to vote with Democrats on major issues.

"Joe and I have known each other 40 years," said Dodd. "On almost every issue, Joe is a mainstream Democrat."

There is speculation that if Democrats bolster their Senate majority this fall, they could seek payback by stripping Lieberman of his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairmanship.

While there's no serious talk afoot about punishing Lieberman, Kerry said, "I can't tell you what happens next year."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080615/D91AIUPG1.html

[Driven1]

good news for McCain!

[thelakelander]

I am the only one to show poll numbers.  Specifically, Jewish voters, a traditional Dem voting block, are supporting McCain in higher numbers than usual for a Rep Presidential candidate.

I don't know much about Stephen Dare's comment about Jax Republican's switching over, but if you want just general poll numbers, here's a few:



Here's a World view of Obama and McCain:

Source: Pew Research Center

There's quite a few countries that aren't all that convinced that things will be better under a new Administration but the majority of these polled favor Obama.


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/5834388.html

US women voters head to Obama after Clinton departure: poll

WASHINGTON (AFP) - De facto Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has rapidly picked up support from women voters in the wake of Hillary Clinton's withdrawal from the campaign, according to a Gallup poll out on Wednesday.

Between the eve of the final primaries on June 3 and Monday, Obama's support among all women in polling matchups with Republican rival John McCain has jumped to give him a 13-point margin in this voter group.

According to Gallup, in its surveys covering June 5-9, Obama was supported by 51 percent of women voters compared to 38 percent for McCain.

A week earlier, Obama topped McCain with just a 48-43 percent spread.

Gallup pointed out that Obama's support among women voters is now close to the steady 52 percent level Clinton had in earlier theoretical matchups with McCain, whom she led in this group by 12 points.

It said that the shift of older and married women to Obama appeared to explain his surge.

Married women backed McCain 52-40 percent in the previous poll, and are now evenly split 45-45 percent over the two.

Meanwhile unmarried women liked Obama by 57-32 percent and 57-31 percent in the earlier May 27-June 2 poll and the most recent poll, respectively.

"Now that Clinton is no longer campaigning and the focus of voters' decision-making is a choice between Obama and McCain, female voters may be taking a second look at Obama," Gallup said.

"Indeed, his current 13-point advantage over McCain is essentially the same advantage that Clinton held over McCain throughout her active candidacy."

Among male voters Obama also picked up ground on McCain. McCain led his Democratic rival in the earlier poll by six points, 49-43 percent. In the newest poll, McCain maintained only a two-point spread, 47-45 percent.

The Gallup poll was conducted between May 27 and June 2 among 5,270 voters and has a two-point margin of error.

A Rasmussen Institute poll carried out June 7-9 shows that Obama is ahead of McCain by seven points, 50 percent against 43 percent.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll to appear Thursday in the newspaper confirms the tendency in Obama's favor.

Forty-seven percent of those polled plan to vote for Obama against 41 percent that support McCain, a broader margin for Obama when compared to the same poll in April (46-43 percent).

According to the poll, 54 percent of those surveyed believed "it is important to look for a person who will bring greater changes to the current policies even if he is less experienced and tested," against 42 percent that supported a "more experienced and tested person even if he brings fewer changes to the current policies."

And 59 percent said they believed it was "time to have a president who will focus on progress and help move America forward," against 37 percent who said it was "time to have a president who will focus on protecting what has made America great."

The WSJ/NBC poll was conducted June 6-9 among 1,000 voters, and has a 3.1 point margin of error.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Jun. 16

Obama 304 McCain 221 Ties 13



At the site you can click on individual states for the latest polls.

[Driven1]

obama definitely LOOKS cooler than McCain in that pic.    i'll give him that. 

[thelakelander]

Poll: N.C. up for grabs for McCain, Obama

Raleigh, N.C. â€" Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are in a dead heat in the presidential race in North Carolina, according to a new WRAL News poll.

A survey of 500 likely voters Tuesday by polling firm Rasmussen Reports shows McCain has 45 percent of the vote and Obama has 43 percent. The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

The results are similar to a WRAL News poll released days after the state's May 6 primary, when McCain topped Obama by a 48 to 45 percent margin.

McCain got his his strongest support in the latest poll from voters age 50 or older, while Obama leads among younger voters, according to the poll. McCain also leads among married and wealthier voters, as well as those who say they regularly attend church.

http://www.wral.com/news/local/politics/story/3032997/

[thelakelander]

obama definitely LOOKS cooler than McCain in that pic.    i'll give him that. 

[Driven1]

now look at both photos and tell me which one YOU think would negotiate with terrorists???