As I've discussed endlessly (heh) in comments, I want whoever the nominee is to be the choice of democratic voters.  I don't want  a delegate win, I want a voter win.  Because it's the voters we have to get back out in November.  In anticipation of Super Tuesday, here's my calculations of the popular vote so far.  I will update it after Super Tuesday.  As expected, it's close between Obama and Clinton.

Clinton               Edwards            Obama
  70,505             71,222           89,864        IOWA+
112,610             48,818           105,007      NH++
  58,893             43,384             52,339       NEVADA+
141,217             93,576           295,214       SC
854,391           247,926           567,027       FLA+++

1,237,616       504,926          1,109,451         TOTAL

Barack Obama on his ability to win in November vs. Hillary Clinton (transcript via TPM, emphasis mine):

Brody: Will Hillary be a drag for down-ticket races as a presidential candidate?
Obama: I think there is no doubt that she has higher negatives than any of the remaining democratic candidates. That's just a fact and there are some who will not vote for her. If you look at the results in Nevada, for example, she eked out the popular vote victory over me, but I ended up winning more delegates because she got almost all of her votes from Clark County, Las Vegas and some of the traditional democratic areas. We got votes there, but we also got votes in northern Nevada and rural conservative regions of the state that traditionally don't vote Democratic, but were excited about my campaign.

I have no doubt that once the nomination contest is over, I will get the people who voted for her. Now the question is can she get the people who voted for me? And I think that describes sort of one of the choices that people have, just a practical choice, as they move forward.

Don't be so sure Senator.

I found this through Corrente and maybe others have already seen this, but it appears the Nevada precinct supporter was not the first to use the pitch that Republicans could be Democrats for a day to support Obama.  Folks in Florida were way ahead on this starting in April 2007, see http://www.obamaflorida2008.com/plugins/ p2_news/printarticle.php?p2_articleid=17 .

Kind of makes you wonder if it's a national plan.  From the obamaflorida2008 website:

There has been a lot of attention paid to the amazing youth turnout that Obama has managed in Iowa and NH and with good reason.  It's a terrific development for the country and Democrats.  They are the future and it's good to see them voting with us, even if it's not my primary candidate that's getting them out there.

Obama did not do well among older and lower income voters.  Clinton won these.  If the sampling I spoke to in NH is at all representative, Obama is not connecting at all with these voters, just as Clinton has struggled to connect with younger voters.  This could be as big a problem for him if he is the nominee as the youth vote could be for Clinton.  Because it wasn't clear to me that these voters would come out for Obama like they came out for Clinton.

The older voters, particularly women, love Clinton and so she's probably always going to do well among them.   Many of the older voters are every bit as passionate about Clinton as younger voters are about Obama, it's just harder to show public displays of political passion when you're 70.  But I was struck by how dismissive many of them were of Obama.  Not hostile, just dismissive and it didn't strike me as being racially motivated.  I think Obama's problem is that older voters know Hillary Clinton.  If you ask them what she has done they can tell you in general, even if not in detail - she worked on healthcare, she's helped women and children.  None of them could tell you what Obama has done.

I've been in a campaign bubble since Saturday, working for the Clinton campaign in NH.  With all of the polls being wrong, I thought I'd write a brief diary on what the ground game was like in one small part of NH for the Clinton campaign.  Full disclosure:  I'm just a volunteer and I've never participated in any kind of GOTV effort before, so I'm not the best person to give comparisons to other campaigns.  I can say that our area of NH had incredible success in turning out HRC voters. We were supposed to help off-set Obama strong-holds in other parts of the state.  The result was that there were record turnouts in several wards and overall in our town Clinton beat Obama almost 2-1 and Edwards 2.5 or 3 to 1.

We got to NH over the weekend.  When we arrived we found out a couple of things.  The first is that the Clinton GOTV organizers for our area had already canvassed just about all of their "1s"  and that they were relieved to find that almost 100% indicated they were still sticking with Clinton.   They also were keeping almost all of their 2s. So they knew their hard-core support was still there.  (FYI, as has been reported, the Clinton campaign categorizes voters on a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being Clinton supporter, 2 a leaner, 3 an undecided, 4 a leaner the other way, and 5 a supporter of another candidate.  

The other thing we asked the local coordinator about was the Obama GOTV effort.  We learned that it was good, but might have some weaknesses.  First, much like Clinton in Iowa, Obama arrived later than Clinton in the towns where we were.  They were also using fewer grassroots NH folks to run their GOTV effort in our area.  The Clinton GOTV effort was run by a local resident and she had been working for the Clinton campaign for six months.

In her interview on ABC this morning Hillary Clinton raised a question about whether women have difficulty caucusing.  Whether they are likely to feel less comfortable standing up in front of others in a social setting and declaring their opinion.  

When this was reported on Talking Points Memo, the comments basically suggested that this was nothing more than Hillary bemoaning her future loss in Iowa or otherwise denigrating this suggestion.  I think this is a mistake.  I don't know the answer, but I think the issue deserves more thought than simply using it to insult Clinton.  Although, really, anytime anyone during this election has suggested that gender plays any kind of role in politics in any way that hurts women, they have been attacked, usually by the MSM (as others have documented, compare the hysteria around Clinton playing the "gender card" - which was a highly questionable interpretation of events - to Bush in his flight suit or Rudy pullinig his manly-man schtick, Clinton was seen as a whining complaint for favoritism, the others just good politics without any gender cards being played at all).

I don't believe Clinton indicated that she worried that women might feel constrained from standing up for her as opposed to one of her opponents, but that women might feel constrained from standing up under social pressure for anyone.  Given studies that have been done about the relative differences of men and women in how talkative they are (men tend to dominate mixed gender discussions) and in the classroom, I think there is a real issue to be addressed about how women participate in caucuses (see http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.to pic58474/krupnick.html for an example of the classroom studies).  Not just whether they show up, but whether they are more or less likely to cave to social pressures in the room than men or any other differences in the quality of their participation.

I don't think this is answered simply by having a woman or two stand up and say that she doesn't care who her husband and his friends caucus for or who her friends caucus for, which is usually how the MSM deal with these kinds of issues.  There are always exceptions and we're not talking about every woman, we're talking about a gender difference overall between men and women (which of course might not exist between two particular people). I'm one of those women who never had a problem speaking in class or anywhere else, but I know that that makes me the exception rather than the rule in a lot of circumstances.  What I don't know is if caucusing is one of them.

Before the trolling starts, let me be clear that I don't think this is about Clinton winning or losing Iowa.  First, I think gender issues in politics is a bigger issue than Clinton, although certainly her candidacy has highlighted how much our society remains screwed up about gender.  Second, to the extent the phenomenon exists, I'm not sure it necessarily hurts Clinton.  The social pressure could come as much for a woman to caucus for Clinton as against her.

The caucus system completely disenfranchises some voters - first responders, people on the swing shift, military persons overseas.  What I'm also interested in is whether there are any gender effects of a system that requires you to be willing to stand and be counted?  Either in willingness to attend (women make up the majority of caucus goers, so my guess here is that it does not) or how the person participates (this I think is the real question).

It wouldn't surprise me if there were gender differences, but I have no idea.  

I do think that people's desire to simply dismiss Clinton's suggestion is a mistake.  I understand why they are doing it, but as I've said a million times before, to the extent sexism drives elections, it hurts democrats, not just Clinton.  Because even when we nominate a man, he gets painted as a woman. And because women are part of the democratic base and anything that lessens or hurts their participation is a problem for democrats (same thing for African Americans, unions, and other base constituencies).  

Via Mark Halperin's The Page, Obama has sent a campaign memo out with this language:

"Right now groups supporting Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are flooding Iowa and the other early states with millions of dollars in paid ads, phone calls, and mailings. Some of it is negative and even deceptive, and a lot of it is paid for by huge, unregulated contributions from special interests. Taking on these groups isn't just a matter of setting the record straight about me or my positions. It's about proving that a new kind of campaign -- funded by ordinary people who want something better for all of us -- can defeat the same tired, old political textbook that so many Americans just don't trust anymore."

According to Halperin, here are the awful groups undermining American democracy in Iowa (presumably by campaigning against Barack Obama):

For Hillary Clinton
AFSCME: $907,177.24
AFT: $635,822.19
Emily's List: $297,806.69
Total: $1,840,426.12

For John Edwards
Working for Working Americans/Carpenters: $516,216.51
Alliance for a New America (SEIU): $760,801.00
Total: $1,277,017.51

Does Obama understand that the only way he's going to have a chance in hell in November 2008 is to get unions and other parts of the Democratic base to support him?  Unions and groups like Emily's List are not part of some tired, political textbook of politics as usual.  They are key to electing Democrats.  

Oh, and by the way Harvard guy, unions represent "ordinary people."