So says the NYT, of Hillary-Obama nation-wide.
Update: One detail from the CBS write-up of this poll makes no sense to me: "The picture in the states voting on Super Tuesday is not nearly as close as the overall picture and offers some good news for Clinton. Among voters in those states, she leads Obama, 49 percent to 31 percent, with 16 percent still undecided." It's hard to know what to make of this without knowing the distribution of the sub-sample across the various Feb. 5 states, but it seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. My guess would be that, in order to be tied nationally, Obama would actually have to be slightly ahead in the Feb. 5 states, since he tends to do better in states where he's campaigned and run ads, and there are a lot more of those places voting on Feb. 5 than not. So either my intuition about this is completely wrong (wouldn't be the first time) or the poll is...
One possible explanation is that we're dealing with a small-ish sample size and therefore a large margin of error. The poll write-up says: "This poll was conducted among a random sample of 1232 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone January 30-Feb 2, 2008. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The poll included 491 Democratic primary voters; the margin of error could be plus or minus 5 points." That means the subset of voters used for the Feb. 5 states is significantly smaller than 491, and so the margin of error is significantly higher than +/- 5. But still...
If there are any pollsters out there with theories/explanations, I'd love to hear 'em.
--Noam Scheiber