Barack Obama’s surge in Pennsylvania appears to have stopped after the controversy over his remarks about bitter small town voters clinging to guns and religion, according to a new poll.
But the Quinnipiac University survey, the first taken since coverage of the remarks, also doesn’t show immediate evidence that Obama has been wounded.
The poll showed Hillary Clinton with a 50 percent to 44 percent lead over Obama, the same as a week earlier over Obama, who had been narrowing her lead from single digits.
Obama reinforced his overwhelming support among black voters, while Clinton held a 20-percentage-point edge among white voters, the poll found.
The survey also showed more of the bitterness that many Democrats are worrying about: 26 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee, while 19 percent of Obama’s backers said they would support McCain if Clinton is the nominee.
The poll of 2,103 likely voters in the April 22 Democratic primary was conducted by telephone from Wednesday through Sunday. The news of Obama’s comments at a fund-raiser in San Francisco broke on Friday night. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.