Gallup Has Clinton Up By 7 Points Over Obama

Daily tracking poll:

In the most recent tracking period, Clinton holds a seven-point lead over Obama among Democratic primary voters nationwide, 48% vs. 41%.

I have been applying the state-by-state poll numbers (as they become available) to the number of delegates in each Super Tuesday state, and as of right now I estimate Hillary would take about 1,100 delegates to Obama's 900. (It doesn't sum to the total of 2,088 because we have no polls for some of the states.)  Big caveat: I understand that this is an extremely naive way of determining delegate allocation, and by naive I mean wrong. There are all kinds of funky rules that each state has for awarding delegates, which I have neither the time nor the skill (probably) to grasp, and even if I did, it probably wouldn't help to fine-tune the prediction because the polling data (that I could find) is only on the state level, and you'd probably need county-by-county polls to make an accurate prediction. The purpose of just multiplying out the poll numbers and delegates is to get a ballpark estimate.

One of the oddities is that Connecticut is basically a tie (or favors Obama), while Massachusetts is Clinton by 6-24, depending on who you believe, and New York is Clinton by 16-28. It seems really strange to have such disparate results in neighboring states, but this is the first time I have ever even tried to take a fine-grained look at polls, so maybe that expectation is wrong. The +16 Clinton figure from NY is the most recent, so maybe tomorrow's will be in single digits. But the Massachusetts polls are supremely weird, because one taken on 1/28 has Hillary by 6 and the one on 1/30 has her by 24, not just a whopping disparity but the opposite of the trend you'd expect.

The other oddity is that Tennessee has Hillary by 17-33, while neighboring Georgia has Obama by 16.  Georgia has a far higher percentage black population. Is that the whole story?

One kind of obvious point: How great is it that we don't use winner-take-all, like the Republicans do in their primary? By my rough calculations, that would give Hillary 1,700 delegates and Obama 300, a result wildly unrepresentative of the people's choices. And it would concentrate the campaigning in those states that were close enough to flip, depriving millions of people an opportunity to engage with the issues. This is a much better way.