by Mark Silva
If there seems to be a confident air about John McCain these days, look at these numbers.
In matchups with either of the two Democrats battling for their party’s presidential nomination, McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee from Arizona, has held rock steady in rolling tracking surveys conducted by the Gallup Poll for some time now.
Democrat Barack Obama and McCain run dead even in the newest results posted today — at 45 percent. Democrat Hillary Clinton also holds a statistical tie with McCain. Gallup’s track of the contest between Obama and Clinton have shown more fluctuation, but a similar trend.
Voter preferences have held “remarkably steady,” Gallup reports of its surveys of no fewer than 1,000 adults each day. The latest results, from April 1-5, come from a survey of 4,403 registered voters, with a possible margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
This is for the summer campaign.