Politico is having a field day with alarmism and catastrophic predictions for as many people as it possibly foresee a catastrophe for. "Iowa Leaves the GOP in Complete Disarray" is the headline for one article saying that all the Republican candidates are screwed because too many of them survived. Huckabee, who won by a solid margin, is of course in trouble because he'll actually have to work for a decent showing in New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton is "fighting for survival," now that Barack Obama has this momentum thing that Clinton's strategists "are uncertain how to stop," despite the fact that she's got 30-point leads in some key states. While she's going to lose some support after last night, and some more after she loses new Hampshire on Tuesday, she's got very solid (20 points or more as of the latest composite scores on pollster.com) leads in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Florida to give her a buffer before Obama gets to South Carolina. There is no way in hell she's going down without a major fight.
In my own reading of this article, Edwards is now cozying up to Obama by declaring that "the status quo lost, and change won." It sounds to me like Edwards is implicitly lumping both himself and Obama into the category of "acceptable 'change' candidates," and hopes Obama will take him along for the ride. Joe Trippi, who was knee-deep in trash talk about Obama on Tuesday, has now set his sights on Clinton: “There are a lot of people who are around the Clinton machine for one reason and one reason only: they’re going to win. And guess what just happened? They didn’t win.” For the record, I think he's absolutely right about that. Hillary's support is broad, but I don't think it's more than skin deep in a lot of places.
The other story that I heard a good amount about last night, and rightly so, was the turn-out. Not only did Barack Obama win, he drew in huge amounts of new voters for the Democrats. AP is reporting a turn-out for Democrats alone of 239,000 voters. For the sake of perspective, that's more than twice the turnout numbers from 2004. More to the point, not only does that 239,000 contrast to 114,000 in 2004, it's also a hell of a contrast to the 115,000 Republicans that caucused this year (compared to 88,000 in their last contested caucus in 2000). Iowa, of course, went to Bush by about 10,000 votes in 2004. Democrats tacked on almost 100,000 voters in the span of four years and the GOP tacked on just shy of 30,000 in eight years. I'm jumping at the thought of what the numbers are going to be in November of this year.
More:
- Obama won on his own numbers, not piggybacked on with Richardson and Biden and the others.
- Rudy Giuliani : September 11 :: Tom Tancredo : Immigration
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