WASHINGTON — Although Barack Obama had trouble winning women's votes in his primary battles against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee has taken a commanding lead over Republican John McCain among women in the general election campaign for the White House, a national poll released Tuesday showed.

The poll, commissioned by Lifetime Network as part of its "Every Woman Counts" campaign to engage women in the presidential campaign, showed that 49 percent of women prefer Obama as president and 38 percent favor McCain, with 10 percent undecided.

Obama and McCain have both targeted women voters in the wake of Hillary Clinton's historic but unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. And while Obama came up short against Clinton among women voters in the primaries, 76 percent of those who voted for Clinton supported him in the Lifetime Network poll. Even so, 18 percent of Clinton's primary supporters said they support McCain.

Despite Obama's 11 percentage point lead among women, he still falls short of a majority and, as a result, "the race for women is not decided yet," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who conducted the survey along with Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster. The two discussed their findings with reporters at a news conference.

"Women like Obama primarily for his personal attributes," said Lake.

"There's no question that Senator Obama wins the likability contest," Conway added, noting, for example, that 51 percent of women would rather carpool with Obama, 20 percentage points higher than those who would prefer McCain. Similarly, 49 percent would prefer to vacation with the Obamas, 26 percent with the McCains.

But Conway also suggested that the 18 percent of former Clinton supporters who now support McCain are doing so for some of the same reasons that they supported Clinton in the Democratic primaries - mostly, experience in foreign policy matters as well as domestic issues.

The issues of top concern to women are the economy (41 percent), the war in Iraq (24 percent), health care and prescription drugs (23 percent) and education (17 percent). Forty-seven percent said they want to hear the candidates talk more about the economy in the coming months.

Sixty-nine percent of those polled agreed that Clinton's campaign for president this year will help future female presidential candidates, and the same percent believe she will run for president again in the future. But 57 percent said Clinton herself would never become president. Still, 44 percent said that because of Clinton's groundbreaking campaign - she won 23 primaries or caucuses - a woman would become president within the next eight years.

"Mrs. Clinton is credited with really paving the way for an eventual female president of the United States," said Conway.

But most of the women polled said that choosing a female running mate would make no difference in their votes this fall. Five-five percent said it doesn't matter if Obama chooses a woman as his vice presidential nominee, and 62 percent said the same for McCain.

Asked what the undoing of Clinton's campaign was, only 21 percent said she lost "because she is a woman," while 31 percent blamed the loss on "who she is and what she stands for" and 34 percent said she fell short against Obama because of "the kind of campaign she ran."

The poll results were based on interviews with 500 women across the country on July 25-29. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Lifetime's nonpartisan "Every Woman Counts" campaign began in 1992 in an attempt to get candidates to focus on issues of importance to women, to motivate women to register and vote and to encourage women to run for public office. The campaign includes an 11-city bus tour this summer, including stops at the party conventions in Denver and St. Paul, and an online program in which women are encouraged to upload "If I were president" videos explaining what they would do in the Oval Office.