Sen. John Kerry’s endorsement of Barack Obama last week was generally met with indifference or derision amongst the political chattering classes (never a hotbed of Kerry support). If his endorsement had value, many said, why wouldn’t it have been secured before the NH primary, which Kerry won four years ago?
The DailyKos blogger DHinMI has a response that’s worth reading. If Kerry turns over his fundraising-contact database to the Obama campaign (a logical assumption), there could be some buried treasure there in terms of voter profiles and fundraising potentials. That makes sense unless Obama (and perhaps HRC) have already mined the known universe of Democratic activists and donors.

Initial reports from New Hampshire is that voting is very heavy, particularly among Democrats. As in Iowa, the weather is cooperating.
One of the key variables in NH is registered independents, who can participate in either contest. In Iowa, indies chose by a three-to-one margin to caucus with Democrats, though some observers argued that the extraordinary attention the Dem candidates were paying to the state, and the virtual absence of two major GOP candidates (McCain and Giuliani) skewed those numbers. NH will be a better test of indie partisan leanings, since if anything the Republican race is perceived as the closest.
If Barack Obama wins the Democratic primary, as most late polls predicted, a lot of attention will be paid to any evidence that his campaign had a tangible impact on turnout, particularly among indies and/or first-time voters.

No, the title of this post doesn’t refer to candidate who may drop out after a poor showing in today’s NH primary, but to the return of exit polls–and the frantic search for leaked exit poll data–now that we are into primary season. Fortunately, Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com reminds us that reforms in the exit poll distribution system in 2006 are still in place, which makes it unlikely that you’ll be reading any purported exit poll numbers until early this evening.
That will be a big change from 2004. On NH primary day of that year, a mid-day LA Times exit poll showing Howard Dean narrowly ahead of John Kerry produced all sorts of hysteria, and led Kerry himself to rush onto the streets of Manchester to wave at passing cars in an effort to snag some more votes. Kerry won comfortably in the end, but probably aged a year that afternoon.

Though it was no real surprise, the Senate vote yesterday to give the administration new, unconditional funding for the Iraq War was another landmark, especially given the vows of Democratic congressional leaders that the bucks would stop this time around. There’s another shoe left to drop, since the House omitted Iraq funds in its version of the appropriations bill, but it’s unlikely that position will prevail when the Senate version is voted on in the House. 20 Democrats (plus Joe Lieberman) joined with all the Republicans to give Bush a portion of his Iraq request.
While many precincts in the progressive blogosphere are already treating this news with angry denunciations of Democratic caving and cowardice, it’s not clear if or how it will affect the presidential campaign. Biden, Clinton, Dodd and Obama all missed the vote, though all but Biden voted “no” in a similar circumstance last spring. Recent polling has shown Iraq gradually declining as the central issue in the presidential race, but those candidates (notably Edwards and Obama) who are implicitly or explicitly running against “politics as usual” in Washington can be expected to make some hay over the vote–particularly Edwards, who doesn’t have to explain why he missed it.

At Salon, Walter Schapiro offers a good description of the sharply diverging rhetoric of the Big Three Democratic presidential candidates on the campaign trail in Iowa. He notes that their varying “strategies for change” have displaced policy arguments as differentiators, but doesn’t hazard a guess as to which one is currently working.

A batch of Mason-Dixon polls (done for MSNBC and the McLatchey papers) came out over the weekend, covering both parties’ presidential contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. And to some extent, these polls throw monkey wrenches into the rapidly emerging conventional wisdom that Obama’s surging past HRC in Iowa; Edwards is irrelevant; and Huckabee’s conquering all on the GOP side.
For one thing, Mason-Dixon shows HRC still up in Iowa. On the other hand, it shows Obama nearly catching up with Clinton in NH and in SC. Edwards is still hanging in there in Iowa; is still looking weak in NH; and for the first time ever, seems to be making a move towards respectibility in his native state of SC (at 18%, compared to 28% for Clinton and 25% for Obama).
The most interesting Mason-Dixon finding is a test of what would happen in NH if either Edwards or Obama drops out after IA. As you probably know, the CW is that if Obama can croak Edwards in IA, he can consolidate the anti-HRC vote and perhaps win decisively in NH and beyond. But this poll shows Edwards voters in NH going overwhelmingly to Clinton, even though Obama voters (if he were to drop out after IA) would go overwhelmingly to Edwards.
The bad news in these polls for Edwards is that for all the talk about his massive union support, he’s running a very poor third in Nevada, a state where a lot of folks thought he might post an early win if he survives IA.
On the Republican side, Mason-Dixon shows Huckabee with a big (12%) lead in Iowa, but still running fourth in NH. Giuliani has sunk to an astonishing 5% in IA (fifth place), a good indicator of how voters there treat you if you disrespect them. And five candidates are competitive in SC, the state where the whole deal could go down, or at least winnow the field to two prior to the February 5 mega-primary.

David Yepsen of The Des Moines Register today recites all the indicators of a record Democratic turnout at the January 3 Iowa Caucuses, and guesses it will help Clinton and Obama, perhaps at the expense of Edwards. Meanwhile, signs of a less-than-impressive Republican turnout may help Mike Huckabee, who has the most motivated supporters.

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics has an interesting take on the five biggest mistakes made in the presidential campaign up until now. One was Fred Thompson’s decision not to participate in the first GOP debate in NH, for which Granite State voters appear to be punishing him. A second was Mitt Romney’s failure to do his Big Religion Speech earlier in the cycle, making it now look like an act of desperation. A third was Hillary Clinton’s refusal to consider skipping Iowa, where she’s now in a difficult struggle that could destroy her national lead.
Bevan attributes a fourth and fifth big mistake to a single candidate, John McCain, for his notably unsuccessful “front-runner” strategy early in the race, and for his poor handling of the immigration issue.
20-20 hindsight is often easy, but now that voters are on the brink of finally weighing in, it is interesting to think about how the race might have been reshaped.

A staff post here yesterday mentioned an Iowa State University poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers that showed a relatively big lead for Hillary Clinton, along with a surprisingly poor third-place standing for Barack Obama. We noted that the polling data was a bit stale. But now, via Chris Bowers, we learn that the ISU poll also had a strange sample bias: self-identified independents were excluded. Since these voters are expected to provide about one-fifth of the Democratic Caucus participants, this is a pretty important distortion.
To be clear, no amount of indie love for Obama would enable him to overcome HRC’s 11-point lead in this poll, but it’s a good reminder that all polls are not created equal, even if their headlines get reported that way.

Just in time to offset the negative buzz from the new Des Moines Register poll showing Barack Obama narrowly ahead of her in Iowa, two new polls came out today showing Hillary Clinton leading among likely caucus-goers in the state. A Pew/AP poll put her ahead of Obama 31%-26%, with Edwards trailing at 19%, and more strikingly, an Iowa State University poll had her with a comfortable 31%-24% lead over Edwards, with Obama third at 20%. Pew also showed Clinton as having robust leads in NH, SC and nationally.
But these two new polls of IA have to be reported with an asterisk: some of their data is a bit old. The ISU poll was conducted from November 6-18 (as compared with November 25-28 for the Register poll), while the Pew survey (see a discussion of the unusually long field range for this survey at Pollster.com) was run from November 7 until November 25.
On the Republican side, the ISU survey had Romney leading Huckabee 25%-22%, with the same asterisk. I’m sure that both Obama’s and Huckabee’s handlers will say the poll missed their candidates’ most recent surges.