Oops. Botched formatting. Mark Warner leads Jim Gilmore 53-37 in their race for US Senate.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_c ontent/politics/election_2008__1/2008_se nate_elections/virginia_senate

I'd say NH is not competitive and about 55% D voting.

The national Democratic game, just on the 1% annual trend is
WI  ~53%
NM  53
IA    53
OH  52  -> election winning EVs
FL   51+
NV  51
CO  50
MO  49+
VA  49+
AR  49
AZ  48-49
WV 48

Of course, in Nevada a 51/49 is a mere 8,000 vote difference and in Florida it's about 250,000 votes.  Though there always tends be a roughly 1% Third Party vote.

As for baselines, we're seeing about 48% for the Democratic nominee and 42-43% for the Republican one.  That's +3% vs -2-3% relative to 2004.  A fit to the 1% per year shift.

And those two baselines are pretty exactly Clinton's favorable/unfavorable.  She's already won the remainder- the swing vote- over from viewing her as unfavorable to neutrality.  Watch as in the next few months they go over from neutrality to viewing her as favorable.

There's no "shorthand from the 90s" or "failed health plan".  Clinton's proposal never failed, conservative Democrats just refused to vote for the bill because their older white constituents didn't want to help pay for all the additional health care neglected poor black and Latino people could be expected to seek out.  Clinton's "high negatives", just like John Kerry's, are simply reflections of the blind partisanship against them and Democrats' internalized shame at their own weakness, at failure to keep them from getting smeared.  Get over the shame and internalized submission to conservatism, and the "high negatives" are purely a lagging indicator of Republican/conservative majority for a very long time.

It doesn't matter whether Clinton "breaks away" or not if she is the nominee, her election is a referendum on 40 years of Nixonian Republicanism coming to an end (or not).  Neither Edwards or Obama represent that.  They're both about attempting to resurrect an old center-Right status quo, enforced by moderate Republicans and "centrist" Democrats for many years, that was pulverized by the Bush/Cheney/DeLay Republicans between 2003 and 2006.  It simply can't be recovered.  Forget it, we're not going back to the Nineties.

The issue mandate is mostly defined by the Senate elections downticket, obviously.  To a lesser degree in the House elections, where I think we'll see a couple of Blue Dogs bite the dust (Lampson and Marshall, anyway) and a bunch more smart liberals elected north of the Potomac and Ohio and Missouri.  And a couple of moderates wiping out some Republican crud in the Southwest and along the historical borders of the South.

That's a valid comparison.  Arkansas and West Virginia are the only two states, other than the deep-blue ones, where Democrats have a double-digit registration advantage.

In 2004, 41% of Arkansas voters were Democrats and only 31% were Republicans.  Of course, Bush still won in a walk, just as he did in West Virginia.  But the results could easily be different if the ticket didn't have such a blatant North-South cultural divide.

 Of course, all of this is true.

 It is worth mentioning that, while Arkansas is blue, it is still a largely rural state with rural values.  Change does not come quickly in a state like Arkansas, or my current home of Tennessee.

 That Arkansas, and to a lesser degree, Tennessee (which is much more Republican than Arkansas) have gone to Republican candidates in the Presidential races of 2000 and 2004 is more a reflection of the unwillingness of those Presidential candidates to actively campaign in these states than the conservatism of those states.

 Gore could have easily won Tennessee, had he campaigned here, giving him the election without the benefit of Florida.

 This is where the guy from "Whistling Past Dixie" gets it wrong.  No Presidential candidate since 1900 has won the office without carrying at least one southern state.  That Arkansas is not treated as a consistent swing state is more a reflection of what's wrong with the consultant class in DC than what's wrong with Arkansas or any other swing state.

 Until we recognize that every electoral vote is important, and campaign as such, Democrats will continue to be dogged with "near" victories.