Gallup Daily: Tracking Election 2008

PRINCETON, NJ -- Hillary Clinton has rebounded among Democrats in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking average for Feb. 16-18. She is now at 45% to Barack Obama's 46%.

Clinton was seven percentage points behind Obama in the Feb. 15-17 average. In Monday night's interviewing, Clinton's percentage of the vote of national voters was higher than Obama's, but there has been fluidity in the nightly tracking numbers over the past several days as Democrats nationally process the intense, often heated, nature of the campaign. Monday's news coverage of the Democratic campaign was replete with a focus on the Clinton campaign's charges that Obama had plagiarized material from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and other negative attacks on Obama by the Clinton campaign. It is unclear which, if any, of these factors could be responsible for changes in the candidates' standing.

The outcome of Tuesday's voting in Wisconsin will be the next major event to have the potential to affect the standing of the candidates.

By contrast, there is great stability on the Republican side, with John McCain maintaining a 28-point lead over Mike Huckabee, 54% to 26% among national Republican voters. -- Frank Newport

Methodology: Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008. The results reported here are based on combined data from Feb. 16-18, 2008, including interviews with 987 Republican and Republican-leaning voters, and 1,204 Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. For results based on these samples, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.