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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Thoughts and Predictions

It's only been a month since Iowa.

(AP) Super Tuesday weather could snarl vote. (Midwest mostly.)

Polling: At this point, the polling is near worthless. Between the earlier failures in NH, and the reworking of the likely voter modeling to try and reflect the huge turnouts, the polling has turned into garbage. ((Reuters) Obama +13 in California? (SurveyUSA) Clinton +10 in California.) So, take it for granted that it's close and wait and watch.

One of the curious items I'm noticing is that the polling (national, at least) still shows significant numbers of undecideds. Adding that to the margin of error, there's alot of wobble.

Winning: Even after it's all done, the general consensus seems to be that we won't have a clear winner, and that the entire post-Tuesday exercise will be who can spin it best. (Clinton has the harder job, because, as the perceived frontrunner a week ago, the bar has been set higher for her.

Plus, the media seems to be chomping at the bit to write a Clinton obituary.)

Questions: How will the turnout be on the Dem side? Are we looking at general election numbers?

How will the Edwards voters break? The early belief seems to be that they're breaking significantly for Obama, but we won't really know that until tonight/tomorrow.

Do the early results in NY/NJ/Conn/Mass/etc affect the west?

Suggestion: If you're looking for detailed, up to the minute info, the CNN election page has been, by far, the best national results website since the 2004 election.

Advice: You may be better off just going to sleep. (CNN) "Polls close in California at 8 p.m. PT, 11 p.m. on the East Coast." (And there are going to be lots of paper ballots to count!)

(Politicalwire has that handy poll closing time list by state.)

And the prediction? I have been wrong on almost every prediction this year, so, let's just use this as a discussion starter, eh?

I think Clinton shades the day, but has trouble in the spin war going forward.

(Plus, I agree with the Kos idea that the Obama fundraising advantage becomes huge as we look past today.)

2 Comments:

  • Just quickly on that last note... Has Hillary announced her January and Q4 numbers? All the buzz has been Obama and $32million...

    By Blogger -epm, at 8:50 AM  

  • Q4 was on parity, although I don't remember the number. For January, I've read both 10+ and 13 million from the campaign.

    But more than that, it's about the potential for raising money going forward. Clinton's main fundraising has been a smaller group with alot of them(relatively) donating the maximum, whereas Obama's internet fundraising has alot more upside.

    They reported 170,000 new donors in January.

    There are some questions about how they count those, but if they can go back to those people for only another $20 you're talking $3 million right there, and that's just new donaters in January.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 11:15 AM  

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