Monday Morning Polling Wrap-Up

With less than 24 hours until the polls open, media outlets have dumped a new batch of data in our laps this morning. Let's try to make sense of the numbers.

First up is a bunch of tracking polls from the Reuters/C-Span/Zogby consortium, that look at four key states. Zogby updates his three-day tracking sample by dropping January 31 and adding in results from yesterday. So what we're looking for here, most of all, is momentum. Any gains are likely to be about 1/3 of the difference in support between the day that was dropped and the day that got added. Without further ado:

California: Obama 46 (+1), Clinton 40 (-1)
Missouri: Obama 47 (+4), Clinton 42 (-2)
New Jersey: Obama 43 (+1), Clinton 43 (+0)
Georgia: Obama 48 (+0), Clinton 31 (+3)

That's some pretty astonishing stuff. Of course, it's Zogby, so it's worth taking it with an entire salt cellar.Unlike most pollsters, for example, who are loath to disclose their individual single-day small-sample results, Zogby often trumpets them, the better to capture media attention. Here, according to Zogby, is what he found yesterday:

California: Obama 49, Clinton 32
Missouri: Obama 49, Clinton 39

You may now pick your jaw back up off the floor. The odds that Obama actually has a 17 point lead over Hillary in California are vanishingly small. But as a gauge of raw momentum, Zogby's not too bad. And he also claims that Obama has been maintaining his traditional strengths whilest wittling away at Hillary's lead among Hispanics, and that's downright fascinating.

The other Golden State poll out this morning comes from Suffolk, better known for tracking the NH primaries. The pollsters there have a good reputation, and they actually publish all of their questions, results, and sample information, so give them added points for transparency:

California: Obama 40, Clinton 39

Suffolk also supplies some explanation. About half their sample had watched their debate, but they were evenly split on who had won. Asked to select which of three endorsements was most influential, 23% went for Bill, 19% for Oprah, and 34% for Camelot's heir.

So the bottom line seems to be that Obama's still gaining ground, both in the national surveys and in the state-level samples, almost across the board. He's got Georgia locked up by a large enough margin to win a bunch of extra delegates, and has erased Hillary's leads in New Jersey and Missouri. Those latter two states are likely to split fairly evenly, meaning that neither will be able to gain much of a delegate edge. That's bad news for the Clinton campaign. But the real story here is California, where the race remains too close to call, but where Obama continues to pick up steam.