New York: The bitter fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for sealing the Democratic presidential nomination has not affected their strong positions against presumptive Republican candidate John McCain, a poll survey has found.

In a poll survey conducted by the New York Times/CBS in a hypothetical general election match up, respondents by a margin of 51 to 40 per cent said Obama would defeat McCain and by 53 to 41 per cent opined Clinton would defeat him.

An interesting finding is that though a majority of respondents said that their opinion of Obama has not changed because of his relationship with his former pastor but they simultaneously opined that it could have an effect on whether he should become the Democratic candidate.

While 24 per cent of voters said they thought the Reverend Wright issue would matter a lot or some to them in the fall, 44 per cent of the respondents were of the opinion that it would matter a lot or some to "most people you know."

Just 9 per cent of Democrats said the Wright issue would matter a lot to them on whether Obama should be their party's nominee and the New York Times said even that small a slice of the electorate could be problematic for Obama if he wins the nomination.

The survey, conducted after Obama held a news conference on Tuesday last forcefully renouncing Wright for making incendiary comments, found most Americans saying they approved of the way Obama had responded to the episode and considered his criticism of the Pastor appropriate.

But nearly half of the voters surveyed, and a substantial portion of the Democrats, said Obama had acted mainly because he thought it would help him politically, rather than having serious disagreements with his former pastor.

Source : PTI