Sustainable Ideas...
May 9, 2008
Holiday on Ice: What North Carolina and Indiana tell us about future oil and climate policy
For nearly 2 months now, Senator Clinton has been outperforming the closing polls in primary state after primary state. And no one can possibly say that Senator Obama had a good past three weeks, with the reemergence of Reverend Wright. Yet this time he outperformed the recent polls in both states.
This suggests that in the only other big issue to rise in the last week of the campaign — the gas tax holiday — Obama did not lose votes taking the principled position. As I (and many, many others) have blogged, a gas tax holiday would most likely benefit the oil companies more than the the average consumer. Also, it sends a terrible message about future climate policies (namely that some weak-kneed president might roll back carbon prices the first time the economy hit a rough patch after a cap-and-trade system was passed) — see “Gas tax holiday, Part 3: It is cynical and indefensible no matter who proposes it.”
Clinton proposed the gas tax holiday Monday April 28, eight days before the two primaries. So what happened among late-deciding voters? Here is the answer, based on CBS’s exit poll numbers (overview here, Indiana here, North Carolina here):
