PRINCETON, NJ -- Hillary Clinton has pulled slightly closer to Barack Obama among Democrats nationally, and now trails by a 48% to 43% margin.
Obama had increased his lead to eight percentage points in Gallup Poll Daily election tracking from Feb. 28-March 1, but Clinton did significantly better in Sunday night's interviewing, resulting in the narrowed gap in the most recent three-day average.
The weekend included frenetic campaigning on the part of both Clinton and Obama, primarily in Texas and Ohio, the two largest states holding primaries on Tuesday. The Democratic race has dominated national news coverage, including repeated reports on Clinton's surprise appearance on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," all of which could have affected the national Democratic numbers. It will be Thursday before Gallup Poll Daily election tracking will begin to register the impact of the voting on Tuesday, and at that point it will be critical to see if one of the two leading Democratic candidates moves out to a substantial lead.
On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee now has just 19% support at the national level, his lowest three-day average since Feb. 5-7. It is all but certain that John McCain, who has 64% of the national Republican vote, will get his party's nomination, but Huckabee has been campaigning actively in Texas over the past weekend and continues to make national television appearances. Should, as expected, McCain win by large margins on Tuesday, there may be pressure from Republican leaders for Huckabee to drop out of the race. -- 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. 29-March 2, 2008, including interviews with 944 Republican and Republican-leaning voters, and 1,292 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.
