A new poll from Rasmussen Reports supports some things I have been saying of for the past couple of months now. First, the Clinton supporters are not all falling in line behind Barack Obama and second, there are a lot of third party and independent voters who are going to make a big difference in the election

First of all the Rasmussen Reports polls show that, during the month of July, the number of Democrats declined, but at the same time the number of Republicans has remained the same. So where did the Democrats go? There has been a large number of Hillary Clinton supporters who will not support Barack Obama, and they are making their feeling known by registering as independents. If they were, the race would not be as close as it is and there also would not be a high amount of undecided voters in some states. We will look the individual states that Hillary Clinton won in the primaries in other articles

The poll shows that 39.2% of Americans consider themselves to be Democrats, the first time since January that the number has fallen below 41% since January. At the same time, the number of Americans who consider themselves to be Republicans has remained at 31.6%. That number has changed just a could of tenths of a percent over past couple of months.

Rasmussen Reports has been keeping track of these figures on a monthly basis since 2002, so this is something they know about. When they took this same poll during the hot and heavy primaries, the number of Americans who said they were Democrats hit record levels. Now if you add up the number if Democrats and Republicans you come up with at total of 70.8% of all Americans. Which leaves 29.2% unaffiliated or third party. Granted, not all of the respondents in the poll will be voting, but it is safe to assume that a good many will. Each month Rasmussen Reports does telephone interviews with 15,000 Americans. That is one of the largest of the polls. With the way Americans feel about answering telephone polls, I don’t think many would answer the questions if they were not at least thinking of voting.

So, who are these ex-Democrats going to vote for? Not John McCain, not the ones who were Hillary supporters. They are too much to the middle and while many consider John McCain to be more to the middle than most Republicans, many still view him as more of a conservative. Some may vote for Barack Obana, but not on the Democratic line. Some may write in Hillary Clinton and some will not vote at all.

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