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New InsiderAdvantage poll: Obama leads in South Carolina

December 9, 2007 — An InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion survey conducted for the Southern Political Report and released this weekend shows Sen. Barack Obama with a slight lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary.

The survey of 430 likely voters was conducted December 7 - 8 and shows Obama with 26% of the vote and Clinton with 24%.

The poll asked: " If the vote in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary were held today, who would you vote for?"

Barack Obama: 26%
Hillary Clinton: 24%
John Edwards: 15%
Joe Biden: 10%
Bill Richardson: 2%
Dennis Kucinich: 1%
Chris Dodd: 0%
Mike Gravel: 0%
No Opinion: 22%

The poll surveyed 430 Democratic likely voters, for a margin of error of plus or minus 5%.

InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery said, “I have no doubt that these numbers are indicative of a major turn of events in South Carolina.

"Our prior polls of this primary showed Clinton splitting the African-American vote almost evenly with Obama.  But, according to our South Carolina Insider editor Lee Bandy, who has spent 40 years as the top political writer at The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, word of the impending visit by Oprah Winfrey to South Carolina on behalf of Obama this weekend spread throughout the black community in the state. Consequently, the new survey shows Obama leading by a small margin,” he said.

(Editor's note:  InsiderAdvantage correctly polled the 2004 Democratic primary in South Carolina. In that race, a few pollsters made the mistake of either incorrectly weighting their Democratic surveys, or of listing the titles of the candidates - for example, “former General Wesley Clark -- which can mislead poll respondents.)

Said Towery, “These Southern contests, where you have a high African-American vote, such as in the South Carolina primary, prove extremely difficult to poll for those unfamiliar with the nuances of minority turnout and responses to telephone surveys.

" I think our track record in such contests, such as our polling in both defeats of former Rep. Cynthia McKinney in Georgia, as well as our overall record of getting these very difficult Southern Democratic primary races correct -- going all the way back to the Bill McBride defeat of Janet Reno in the 2002 Florida gubernatorial race – gives me good reason to have great confidence in our latest survey," said Towery.

"As we went into the weekend, additional polling was showing further erosion of Clinton’s support among African-Americans. Unless an appearance by Bill Clinton, scheduled to counter the Oprah visit, has significant impact, I suspect that this race, where 50% of the vote is African-American, will see Obama extending his lead," he said. 

On Dec. 6, InsiderAdvantage's Lee Bandy served on a panel in Washington, DC, sponsored by The Politico.  Bandy announced there the results of the InsiderAdvantage survey taken earlier last week that showed Mike Huckabee in first place in South Carolina. Some doubted the results of that survey until a series of other polls, including one by Rasmussen and one by Mason-Dixon (the latter conducted for Bandy’s The State newspaper) both confirmed Huckabee's lead.