Exactly - speculating is fun. And a few threads like this keep the horse-race stuff from overwhelming any debate threads about actual issues and substantive stuff.
It’ll be interesting to see how much his Iowa win boosts Obama’s share of the vote in NH.
Having lost Iowa, Edwards’ chance of winning drops to practically nil.
It isn’t just losing Iowa for Edwards, it’s not getting coverage from the (lazy, horse-race-oriented) national press. Richardson’s problem, too. But no matter, that’s how the game is played - Edwards had a chance if Obama hadn’t gotten the Oprah Bump, but now he’s old news. Maybe he can take Libby Dole’s Senate seat now?
The new Reuters poll has Obama leading Clinton in NH now - the short season means he can ride the wave all the way to the convention now.
Maybe. The Dem leadership is still solidly Hillary. They credit their “centrism” with the recent abundance of corporate cash inflowing, Contending with dragons has made them dragons, they place too much importance on cash. Having been beaten about the head like a baby seal for years by money, they overvalue it. They also place too much importance on centrism itself, they think that policies are what roil the public, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Any of the top three is quite acceptable, though I favor Pretty Johnny. Which means that policy-wise, there isn’t that much to choose about. But Hillary has baggage, a lot of folks just don’t like her. Who doesn’t like Obama? If the party leadership is truly more dedicated to progress than to thier own sinecures, they would recognize that it makes no sense at all to choose a candidate to represent progressive positions who is likely to attract less votes than another candidate who can represent those positions equally well, and does not have such a burden!
That the Dem leadership favors Hillary is a factor to be reckoned with. How much? Haven’t the foggiest.
Ah, my frostbitten friend, I see that you’re still burdened by the baggage of “trust” in party leadership. I’ve gotten past that. I’m one of those people who think the progressives in the Dem party are going to have to fight to get that leadership back because the current leadership (read “DLC”) with the possible exception of Dean is too corporate-beholden to be progressive if it would offend their CEO masters.
There are six new polls released last night or this morning that survey NH voters up through yesterday, including the assorted rolling trackers.
Good Lord, it’s like crack for political junkies.
Upshot: four of the six show Obama’s lead in double digits or all but (+9, +10, +10, +13). The other two only give him one- and three-point leads, but even in those polls, the momentum’s clearly swinging his way.
One of the small-lead polls is the Suffolk/WHDH daily tracker, and in that poll, Hillary’s lead has gone from 17 to 16 to 12 to 7 to 2 to -1 over the past several days. The other (Franklin Pierce) shows a swing from a 4-point Hillary lead between Xmas and New Year’s to a 3-point Obama lead now.
Can’t see a reason in the world why this trend should abruptly reverse itself between now and when the polls close in NH tomorrow.
Among the bloggers I check in on, there’s a decent number of rational, non-fanboy Edwards supporters. They still seem to think Edwards can win it. Lord knows I’d like him to win, but he’s missed that bus by not winning Iowa: that’s the only thing that could have propelled him into contention. He’s at 20% (at best) in NH, and he’s not going to magically overtake Hillary and Obama between now and tomorrow night. And even if Hillary’s support tanks to the extent that he can present himself as the main alternative to Obama, that’ll happen too late to do his candidacy much good.
Besides, what’s really happening is that a good chunk of the electorate simply has developed a serious crush on Obama, and there isn’t a damned thing that can be done about it. Unless he commits some massive misstep, the nomination is his.
I think the only thing that could save Edwards would be a second-place finish in New Hampshire. That’s not out of the question, but I think it’s unlikely. If he finishes second, Hillary’s support in South Carolina and beyond might melt away, leaving Edwards as the sole alternative to Obama. But if Edwards finishes third in New Hampshire, Hillary’s support will linger, and she will take enough votes in South Carolina to keep Edwards from having any shot at winning there.
Really I think it’s a longshot for anybody to beat Obama for the nomination at this point. Only a major gaffe or a really wormy skeleton falling out of his closet could undercut him. And I don’t see either happening.
I would truly love to proclaim the Hillary candidacy dead, but it is still too soon. She has too much money and too many powerbrokers in her corner at the moment. Those super delegates, at least for now, are in her pocket.
For Edwards to continue, he must finish in 2nd in NH and get an outright win in SC. If he does not, I think he’ll step aside and throw his support to Obama.
It’s hard to see how Richardson survives past NH, really the traction is not there and will not come. By Wednesday morning I think he’ll bow out.
If Obama wins by 20 points, he’s going to get a lot of new friends in high places. None of those pols wants to be the last one on the bandwagon. A win of less than 10 points buys Hillary life support until Tsunami Tuesday. Short of a personality transplant, she’s just not going to win over hearts as well as she wins over minds. All of her talk about experience and ability is beginning to make her look like Dukakis with breasts. As one of the talking heads on TV noted, she’s gone from being the windshield to being the bug in a very short time.
Joe Trippi thinks Hillary’s campaign is broke, or close to it.
Not that I put much credence in that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the quarterly financial statements that the campaigns will have to release this month will show her cash-on-hand way down from where it was earlier. Of course, the same’s probably true of Obama: the point of raising all this money was to win primaries, and here they are.
The question is what they’ve bought for their money. Obama’s used a good deal of his money to build up easily the most extensive field network (particularly in Feb 5 states) a Presidential contender has ever put together in the primaries. I’m not sure what Hillary’s gotten with hers.
And we’re now up to eleven polls of NH through yesterday on the Dem side. Can you say “beyond totally fucking nuts”? I knew you could. Sheesh.
Map of Obama’s Feb. 5 field offices here.
Endorsements? :D:dubious:
I don’t think Edwards has any realistic hopes anymore of winning the nomination. His best strategy at this point is to hang in and survive enough so that he’s a credible alternative if Clinton and Obama lose the nomination.
Yep. I actually expect he’s hanging some hopes on SC, since he’s from the neighboring (and far superior) state. It’s going to be very interesting to see how Obama does in a state with a higher population of African Americans and racist whites (their huge hoopla over the Confederate flag is my cite, in case anyone needs one from this rather self-evident and relative claim). I expect that he’s gonna issue a trouncing in SC that will cement his nomination: the anti-black racists are a diminishing breed everywhere in the South, and I suspect that he will win a disproportionate number of votes from the state’s African American population.
If Edwards gets as trounced in SC as I expect, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him drop out. Clinton might come in third in the state, but I expect she’s around for the long haul: as far as I know, she, unlike Edwards, has never lost a political race before, and it’s gonna be real tough on her the first time.
Daniel
Chuck Norris doesn’t make endorsements. He tells you how it’s going to be.
New polls out today: Rasmussen says Obama’s leading Clinton by 12; Survey USA has him up by 20. Edwards is well behind Clinton in both.
At that point, Super Tuesday’s only 10 days away, and according to both Gallup and Rasmussen, Edwards is up to 20% in the national polls, with neither Clinton nor Obama above 33%. That’s good reason to stick around for Super Tuesday and see if anything good comes of it, since the national polls are the best proxy we’ve got for Super Tuesday expectations. (As if the fact that he’s been campaigning for years, so why not hang in there for ten more days, wasn’t enough by itself.)
Color me amazed. She had a freaking huge war chest. Where in blue blazes did it all go?
Like I said, I’m skeptical. But it wouldn’t surprise me if she had less than $20M left out of that $100M or more that she’s raised.
I’m no expert here, but from what I’ve read about other campaigns, there seems to be a psychology that hits campaigns that expect from Day 1 that they’re going to lead from wire to wire. They spend whatever they think they need to spend on everything - staff, consultants, travel, advertising, etc. Everyone sees them as a money spigot, and the campaign does too little to convince them otherwise. It wouldn’t surprise me, for instance, to find out that Mark Penn had a contract worth ~$10M.
Everything’s fine as long as they keep winning and the money keeps coming in. But when they’ve spent $80M when they really should have spent only $50-60M for the same stuff, and they lose a couple of early primaries and nobody’s giving, then reality hits like a brick wall.
This happened to the McCain campaign last year, only with smaller amounts. Once George Allen, who had been billed for years as their only serious rival, committed macacacide, they figured they had no competition, the money would roll in, and they could spend money like water. Then it turned out they weren’t even the frontrunners, the money didn’t roll in, and they essentially ran out of cash.
There are at least five polls that are operating as rolling daily trackers in NH: ARG, Zogby, Suffolk/WHDH, Rasmussen, and CNN/UNH. Everyone but CNN is up on the board at RCP with their results including yesterday’s polling. Obama’s ahead by 5, 7, 9, or 13, depending on which one you like, with Suffolk at the low end and Zogby at the high end.
One note about Zogby: they’re a schizophrenic outfit, because they do both Internet polls and your standard telephone polls. When someone’s picking up the tab for the latter (in this case, Reuters and C-SPAN), they’re actually a pretty good polling shop. But their Internet polls are crap.
All internet polls are crap, though, so Zogby can’t really be blamed any more than any outfit that does them.
To be fair, it wasn’t like when CNN puts up a “which candidate do you think won the debate?” question on their website that anyone can come along and answer. They were genuinely trying to construct a representative sample and Web-poll them. It’s just that they still haven’t been able to make it work to nearly the same level of reliability as a telephone poll has.
Time’s Karen Tumulty does some reporting here. And Ezra Klein reminds us that a lot of her cash on hand, maybe $20M, is money raised for the general election that can’t be used in the primaries.
From Tumulty’s piece: