Upended Horse Race
Conventional wisdom about the presidential primaries has completely changed in the last three months. All of the DC insiders thought that Clinton and McCain would clean up in the money and march all the way to the nomination for their parties. Nothing could be further from the truth. The DC punditocracy are changing their rankings and pondering a wide open race.
The Hotline rankings for the Democrats are out and there is no leader. They have Obama and Clinton tied, with Edwards just a hair behind.
There is no Democratic front-runner. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all have a plausible claim on the nomination.
The usual metrics are all jumbled. Clinton leads the money race, leads in New Hampshire, and tops the national polls. Obama leads in South Carolina, in media love, and in enthusiasm. Edwards has the tightest message, the best organization in Iowa, and the lead in Iowa.
The Washington Post focuses on the money race, which is only one of the factors that Hotline takes into account.
The first-quarter fundraising reports from the 2008 presidential campaign crystallized two realities of this intensely fought election: The battle for each party's nomination is more open than it was just three months ago, and each contest pits three relatively well-funded candidates against one another, with the rest of the field at a disadvantage.
Two common assumptions proved false: that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), with the most extensive money network in Democratic politics, would blow away her rivals in first-quarter fundraising, and that Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who had spent the previous two years preparing for this campaign, would easily best his Republican rivals. Instead, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) stunned political observers by raising more money for the primaries than Clinton, and McCain's anemic fundraising and rapid spending left the onetime front-runner on the defensive.
The netroots polling shows a four way race, with Richardson continuing to inch up and away from rest of the second tier and start to approach the front three. Jerome Armstrong charts the Daily Kos, MyDD, Moveon and Democrats.com polls. They are a huge sample of the most engaged part of the Democratic electorate who will be making up a large portion of those who will vote in the primaries.
Richardson is beginning to happen, crawling out of the lower-tier pack and inching his way onto the radar of blog readers and MoveOn members.
Though these groups overlap some, the political-junkie blogs and MoveOn, there are some distinct differences. MoveOn has 35% or 37% that support Kucinich/Clinton/Biden/Dodd, compared with the two blogs that support those four candidates with only 5% or 7% support.
Even though he's dropped to second, MyDD continues to be the place for Obama supporters relative to the others. Obama's support is relatively unchanged over on DailyKos over the past 6 months. Obama's got solid support, but he's not growing-- Edwards is. He's now nearing 50 percent on the blogs.
Clinton's support averages about 5 percent, and has been trending down over the past couple of years on the blogs. Do you remember the polls coming out of Iowa in November of 2003 showing Clinton with a 20 percent lead over all others? I wonder if she sat on the bench in the year she was best positioned to win the Democratic nomination.
Now, these are self-selecting polls, very different from the polling done by firms. However the sample size are in the tens of thousands for the Daily Kos and MoveOn numbers. In many ways the race is catching up to where the blog readers have been for months. It sure is interesting and fun to watch.