I have been helping my local Edwards organizers make ID calls and knock on doors in some rural Eastern Iowa precincts. I do get the sense that, particularly outside of the urban counties, the race is increasingly becoming a contest between Clinton and Edwards.
In making calls through a list of rural Democrats who are consistent primary voters, but who lack a history of attending a caucus, my anecdotal notes show that Clinton is significantly stronger than any other candidate. Accordingly, it does seem that she would benefit from a larger turnout.
Amongst rural Democrats with a record of attending their caucus, my notes show a very competitive race between Edwards and Clinton with Obama distinctly behind. I cannot overemphasize, however, the extreme fluidity of the situation. Quite simply, Iowa Democrats are not in a hurry to make up their minds. Most have narrowed down their choices, like a high school football star narrowing down his list of scholarship offers, but at least are only willing to express two or three candidates that are still in the running for their support.
I am sometimes amazed that Edwards has been mentioned in the same breath with Clinton and Obama by the folks with whom I have spoken. Until this week, people have not received any mail or seen any commercials from the Edwards campaign. I would like to think that this means Edwards has quite a bit of room to grow his support. I am more certain that, at the very least, his numbers will not drop any further in Iowa.
If anyone wants to try to better understand the mentality of Iowans, you really ought to read Garrison Keillor's column from Wednesday. It ran in today's Cedar Rapids Gazette, but you can read it on Salon.com by clicking here.
We are, of course, being bombarded with phone calls from the campaigns. I actually received an ID phone call from the Obama campaign on my cell while knocking on doors for Edwards the other night. I politely informed him of what I was doing and he thanked me for being engaged in the process.
I received a call from the Chris Dodd campaign a week or so ago and also informed the organizer that I was planning to caucus for Edwards. Yesterday, I received a letter from the Dodd campaign. I was surprised and pretty impressed to see a hand-written letter to me on campaign letterhead from the organizer I had spoken to last week. When I looked a little closer, I noticed that while the hand writing was real, it had been photocopied. Trying to pass off a photocopy as though somebody had taken the time to personally write me a letter was a new technique, shall we say, that I had not before seen. The letter is designed so that the organizer can simply write in "Dear __" and sign their name, but everything else is pre-packaged. I found it to be even more ironic considering that the second sentence says, "Even though you had mentioned that you are leaning toward another candidate..." Apparently, the Dodd organizers have to send out so many of these letters that they just all write one, and make a bunch of copies.
Lastly, my wife is pregnant and so we are exploring the world of baby naming books and websites. Many sites, like www.thinkbabynames.com, show graphically how the popularity of a given name has increased or decreased over the years. So, I looked up Hillary; you have to see this. Apparently, Hillary used to be a pretty popular name. It was one of the 200 most popular names for a baby girl until 1992. Since 1992, the popularity of Hillary has sunk like a rock. In the past 15 years, literally millions soon-to-be parents have apparently considered naming their daughter Hillary, and overwhelmingly rejected it... for whatever reason.
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