This is not a good South Carolina poll for Sen. Barack Obama, and his advisers are already beginning to push back a little.
"First, this poll is clearly an outlier from all the other public polls in SC," an adviser tells me.
Second, whites make up 53% percent of the sample, which is "just wrong," the adviser said. "Blacks make up a slight plurality." And the pollster "has such small samples here that your margin of error is really large on groups that make up roughly 50% of the electorate."
Obviously, the voter screen is important too. Primary turnout is generally about 15% of the eligible adult population. CNN interviewed 1,052 adults and filtered a sample of about 380 of them.
The adviser wouldn't say whether Obama's private South Carolina polling conflicts with the public poll, but, well, given the push back, I'd say that it does.
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I don't know what the Obama campaign is looking at, of course, but I stand by what I wrote in a thread below. Given where we are in the cycle, I think this poll is pretty good news. If the campaign has internal data that's better, then that's even better.
Posted by PLM | July 20, 2007 1:19 PM