Originally posted on The Bilerico Project by IN LA magazine editor Karen Ocamb.

Change? Bah, humbug.

When I watched John Kerry endorse Barack Obama, I couldn't help but think: "Here we go, again."

Kerry was the Vietnam war hero turned anti-war hero who threw gays under the bus to get elected in 2004.

And we relented, not wanting to upset Democratic Party big-whigs like Bill Clinton who made it sound like we were the ones who brought on the anti-gay marriage initiatives in eleven states that year. They passed, Kerry lost, and we were blamed. By the way, has either Bill or Hillary Clinton ever confirmed that Bill Clinton advised Kerry to support the anti-gay ballot initiatives as a way of defusing the gay issue?

So here's Barack Obama, so fresh and new - getting his national jump-start at the 2004 Democratic National Convention where he talked about red and blue states and having gay friends.  Yes - he actually used the word "gay." But no more. Both in his New Hampshire concession speech and in his thank you to Kerry, Obama reverted to the code word "equality."

Here we go again.

The NH Secretary of State gave Republican Albert Howard and Dennis Kucinich estimates of the recount cost for their respective primaries yesterday. The cost is about $0.24 per ballot, so $57,600 for the Republican and $69,600 for the Democratic primary. The Ron Paul aligned Granny Warriors have been raising money here and here, they are within $15,000 of the $58k needed for the Republican recount. Kucinich is raising money here, which goes to a Kucinich ActBlue page. The ActBlue page does not appear to distinguish between donations for a recount and donations to Kucinich, so I have no way to tell how much of the $158k he has raised is for a recount. We will know this afternoon if either camp sends a check to NH to start the recount. Checks are due by 3pm EST.

(also posted at Taylor Marsh / Hot Topics Diaries)

Tuesday night was great. What a roller-coaster! Everone expected an Obama win. The question was: by how much?

That didn't happen. By now, all kinds of explanations and conspiracy theories are thrown out there, among them the Bradley effect and the Diebold effect. Various explanations, such as the high number of new voters, the difficulty of predicting who would turn out, and polling in such a narrow window of time and with so many events compressed together, are given by pollsters. But one thing is missed amid all the noise, and it could turn out to be a beauty.

The New Hampshire primary is now over, and I am almost caught up on sleep. There will be no more skipping class or homework to attend candidate town halls or journalist forums, something that's become almost routine these last two years. No more law school style sleep schedules, at least until grad school. This editorial cartoon sums up my own feelings, as well as those of several other voters I've talked to today. The turnout was amazing - over half a million votes cast, and 18% of them from youth voters, 5% more than seniors! It really is different being here in person. It's one thing to watch it all on TV, but quite another to actually be surrounded by the cameras, signs, and mayhem. My guess is a politically apathetic citizen could ignore most of it if they tried - you can turn off your TV, decline the street corner camera's interview requests, and avoid all the rallies. But try as you might, you can't get away from the sign wars or the screaming activists unless you take Mike Huckabee's advice: "Be sure you vote tomorrow, unless of course you're not going to vote for me - than take the day off, drive to Massachusetts, enjoy some Maine chowder!"

I criss-crossed the state meeting candidates, journalists, and voters; talk about a college education. I saw firsthand the power of the media: had Richardson, Biden, or even Edwards been treated differently over the past year, this could be a whole different ballgame. I learned the value of retail politics: Meeting and seeing the candidates really does make a difference. If I were anywhere else, my support for Biden would have been real but less enthusiastic, and my post-Iowa choice would have been Edwards, not Obama. I confirmed that water is better for soda for energy and hydration, but learned that Powerade is even better than water. (Gatorade supporters, you're a bunch of Naderites and aren't welcome in my comment sections!)

On a more academic note, the results dumbfounded me. The remaining undecideds were mostly female and must have broken to Clinton; there's no way other way to explain how so many scientific polls could have been so wrong. Perhaps there was a last minute shift of leaners influenced by Clinton's debate performance and emotional moment that came too late for the polls to catch - a Dewey Defeats Truman effect. I still trust properly conducted polls, but something clearly went wrong, and I'll leave it to the experts to debate about what.

Yesterday I posted an interview with the leader of Dartmouth for Obama. To help balance that out, here are interviews with his Richardson and Edwards counterparts, Leonard Lewis and Brice Acree. The Clinton leader is now full-time Clinton staff, and I wasn't sure who else to contact. I was literally walking to the interview with Lewis when I got word about Richardson's exit; Acree doubled as pseudo-staff for the Edwards campaign.

My camera only shoots three minute videos, so Brice and I ran out of time before I could ask him his favorite memory of the primary. His response was classic: "Of the primary day? The half hour I slept!" He added that it was always fun to sit back and watch the Edwards phone bankers, whether it was the guy who talked about his wife's "thunder thighs" or the high school intern who would insist to voters, "Hillary IS corporate America!" Ironically enough, walking to grab some coffee after the interview, Brice and I checked our campus mailboxes, and he found a handwritten letter from a student at St. Olaf urging him to vote for Richardson. The letter was impressive, as the student was using Dartmouth-specific lingo like "blitz" instead of "e-mail." I remember writing those for Dean, but the targeted knowledge was nothing like this Richardson kid's.

As we head to South Carolina, Nevada, and the rest of the country, I want to sound a note of optimism: things are getting better. I have criticism for all four of our candidates, but I have praise for all four, as well. Without Hillary's 1992 efforts, health care might not be on the table today. Thank God Edwards is sticking it to corporate America and giving voice to the majority of the world's citizens. Dennis Kucinich has proven to me that he is a man worth taking seriously, with ideas worth consideration. And where would we be without Obama's voice of reason countering the bitter partisans on cable TV? Even the Republicans give me hope - assuming they don't nominate Ghouliani. No, none of their candidates are as strong as ours, but with expanded Democratic majorities to keep them in check, McCain and Huckabee may just be worthy of our respect, albeit not our votes. Maybe my optimism is a bit much, and I can't blame anyone who calls Dr. Cox their hero, but tonight, I am happy for America. Thanks for indulging me in these local dispatches, and I now happily slink back to my weekend role. Yay justice, and yay democracy!

Really?

From TPM:

Obama's national campaign co-chair, Jesse Jackson, Jr., just went on MSNBC and appeared to question Hillary's tears, which he called "tears that melted the Granite State," adding that those tears "moved voters."

Most ridiculous passage from Jackson's comments:

Not in response to Katrina, not in response to other issues that have devastated the American people...the war in Iraq, we saw tears in response to her appearance. Her appearance brought her to tears but not Hurricane Katrina.

What he's referring to here is the question that led in to her emotional response on Monday, as related by First Read:

64-year-old Marianne Pernold-Young, of Portsmouth, asked the senator how she got out of the house in the morning and who did her hair.

Clinton joked about having help with her hair and then began to get choked up and teary-eyed.

Watch it:

Which begs the question, is Obama trying to lose? As I've documented, Obama's bounce had already begun fading before Clinton's emotional moment blanketed airwaves on every newscast Monday night, so Jackson and the entire Obama crew might be better advised to look inward as to what Obama himself did or didn't do over the weekend to cause New Hampshire voters in droves to shift from Obama back to Clinton. Sure, no doubt Clinton did something right, at the debate in particular, but Obama I think made two mistakes that night: his "you're likeable enough, Hillary" line was delivered in unusually mean-spirited way and, as I noted in the debate live thread, Obama jumped on defense when Hillary attacked instead of turning it around on her allowing her to dictate the terms of the debate and to come off as the more presidential of the two.

Now, if you want to criticize her for the tears, that's fine, I don't think it's off limits, but framing her emotional reaction as evidence that Clinton's priorities are out of whack doesn't ring true at all. As a post-election loss message strategy, I have to say, I don't know what Jackson and the Obama folks are thinking today.

Update [2008-1-9 18:57:58 by Todd Beeton]:The more I think about this, the more I get what's at work here. They know exactly what they're doing. Notice the repeated reference to Hurricane Katrina. He's using some odious dog-whistle politics here, trying to send the message to African Americans (in other words: South Carolina) that, to borrow a phrase, Hillary Clinton doesn't care about black people. Yeah, good luck with that. [editor's note, by Todd Beeton]Changed title to reflect this update.

Last night here on MyDD, Senate2008Guru posted his theory of what may have contributed to Hillary Clinton's win last night:

New Hampshire's independent voters ostensibly preferred Obama among the Democrats and McCain among the Republicans.  These independents were waiting until the day of the primary election to decide which candidate to turn out for.

Given that the polls looked so much stronger for Obama's victory, many of these independents (who were polling in support of Obama) decided that, with Obama's New Hampshire victory looking so secure, they might as well use their vote to make sure McCain bested Romney.  Only, so many of these independent voters thought the same thing that it shifted Obama's comfortable margin of victory to McCain.

Today, in his post-primary press release, pollster John Zogby confirms Guru's instincts:

We expected that Obama would receive the lion's share of independents and drain the Republican primary of these voters. It now appears that, perhaps with a sense that Obama had a lock on the Democratic side, independents felt free to vote on the Republican side and reward their hero, John McCain.

Or maybe, Zogby just reads MyDD...

We're lucky to have Guru as a sometime contributor here at MyDD but I highly recommend making Senate2008Guru's own blog a daily read.

I am certainly no Ron Paul supporter (I want Kucinich, or maybe Edwards). This is just raw information from the web. You decide what to make of it.

I want to just let the data reported here speak for itself. I got these links from comments on BradBlog. I have global HTML copies of these pages archived, just in case...

Here are the pages' URLs:

http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DE MOCRATS

http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=RE PUBLICANS

Well, that's all folks.

Yes, Hillary Clinton's win last night was a shocker but it's not as though the signs weren't there that the tide was turning. As I wrote yesterday, the Zogby and Suffolk University daily tracking polls, while not showing a stall in Obama's support, did show a halting of Clinton's slide in New Hampshire. Specifically, it appeared to me that this was due to a particularly strong Monday, leading me to suspect a "tighter than expected race." The comments to the post were skeptical at best, my favorite:

A tight race... whistlin' past the graveyard... It's  over for Hillary.

The fact is, the evidence was there, particularly when you look at the final Rasmussen Reports survey, which, when compared to the previous Rasmussen poll, showed a Monday surge.

In other words, when Monday was added to the polling time frame, Clinton gained 3 points on Obama, a huge impact for just one day out of the 3 polled to have. The reason it was so well hidden within the polling at large is that all of the polls were rolling averages of 2 or 3 days, thus diluting the sudden shift that took place toward Clinton.

John Zogby confirms this is exactly what he found in his tracking poll (h/t TPM):

My polling showed Clinton doing well on the late Sunday night and all day Monday - she was in a 2-point race in that portion of the polling. But since our methods call for a three-day rolling average, we had to legitimately factor the huge Obama numbers on Friday and Saturday - thus his 12 point average lead. Unfortunately, one day or a day-and-a-half does not make a trend and we ran out of time.

Because the shift began late Sunday and was evident all of Monday, Clinton's turnaround likely had more to do with the debate than the tearful moment, the wall-to-wall coverage of which didn't kick in until Monday night's evening news. It should be noted too that CNN replayed the debate Sunday night.

If there's a lesson here it's not that all polls suck, but rather that pollsters would be well-advised to get large one day samples, particularly on election eve, rather than rely almost exclusively on multiple day rolling averages. With the primary schedule condensed as it is (only 5 days between Iowa and New Hampshire...) and an unprecedented access to coverage of the candidates, we're likely to have more 1 day swings like the one that changed the game for Clinton in New Hampshire yesterday.

Update [2008-1-9 14:58:54 by Todd Beeton]:yellowdem1129 has more.