News from the VotemasterAnother former DNC chairman, Paul Kirk, Jr., has endorsed Barack Obama. Kirk is a superdelegate, but far more important is the message his endorsement (and that of former DNC chairman Joe Andrew yesterday) sends to the other supers. DNC chairmen think, eat, and breathe politics 24 hours a day (unlike senators, who sometimes get a break to legislate or filibuster). Nobody takes that job for the money (it pays only $105,000 a year). DNC chairs care about only one thing: winning elections. The other supers will pay attention to these endorsements more than those of random congressmen. Hillary Clinton's highest profile endorser recently is Gov. Mike Easley (D-NC) While that may have some impact in the upcoming North Carolina primary, Easley is not a national figure like Kirk and Andrew. Guam caucused today to choose its eight pledged delegates (each with half a vote) to the DNC. Early reports suggest that Obama and Clinton will each get four delegates. Guam also has five superdelegates, each with a full vote. Today's special election in LA-06 is being watched with bated breath. The seat is open because Richard Baker (R) resigned from the House to take a multimillion dollar job as a lobbyist for the hedge fund industry. This Baton Rouge-based district has a PVI of R+7 so the normal procedure for elections here is that the candidates show up, the Republican wins and goes off to Washington, the Democrat sulks off licking his wounds, and it's back to business as usual. Only this time the DCCC has poured $1.2 million into the race for Democrat Don Cazayoux and the NRCC has poured a comparable amount in for Republican Woody Jenkins. Most of the ads are negative. Jenkins' ads call Cazayoux (rhymes with "tax you") a "liberal" and try to tie him to the national Democratic party so everyone is watching closely to see if the old magic still works in the deep south. A poll released yesterday put Cazayoux ahead of Jenkins 50% to 41%. While LA-06 is the only House race today, there are 435 of them in November and CQ Politics has an excellent rundown of the key races in the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. The pollsters who run the most state polls are Rasmussen and SurveyUSA. If you want to see what Scott Rasmussen looks like, look at the video analysis on this page. We have a new batch of primary polls from Indiana and North Carolina today. It looks like Barack Obama will win North Carolina by single digits (down from double digits a few weeks ago). It also looks like Hillary Clinton will win Indiana by single digits. A few weeks ago, Indiana looked like a tie. All in all, Clinton has improved her standing in both states.
We have a new general election poll in New York. Both Democrats beat McCain easily here.
The polling results for all primaries and caucuses are available as a Web page and in .csv format. Besides Kirk's announcement mentioned above, several other supers went public yesterday, netting Clinton about two delegates. Delegates
Needed to win: 2025 Here is another source for delegate totals. -- The Votemaster |