Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Democratic Candidates Debate at Dartmouth Tonight

Tonight, the Rockefeller Center and its partners on campus will host a nationally televised debate among the Democratic candidates for President. It airs live tonight on MSNBC.

Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Julia Steers of MSNBC have posted their "First Read." They note:

A brand-new CNN/WMUR poll finds her [Senator Clinton] with a 23-point lead over Obama in New Hampshire (43%-20%). Back in July, her lead was nine points (36%-27%). With that kind of advantage, and with about three months until the early nominating contests begin, doesn’t each debate become more and more important for the candidates chasing her?

You wouldn't know about that lead in the polls from the early morning visibility around Hanover. Dropping off our son at kindergarten this morning, it was all Obama, all the time, with all four corners of the intersection at Wheelock and Park Streets boasting Obama supporters. I think the chase is on--we'll know more this evening.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forget that Howard Dean won the Hanover vote in 2004 and lost the NH vote. The chase isn't on. Hanover is not a good indicator of NH voting patterns, much less national voting.

Anonymous said...

I'm reminded of the appocryphal story of the New York City high society matron who couldn't understand how Ronald Reagan had won the 1980 election. After all, no one she knew had voted for him.

Anonymous said...

I was thinking the same thing. The line actually comes from an earlier election. It is of Pauline Kael (former NYT film critic) saying that of Richard Nixon.
http://www.senate.gov/~bennett/press/record.cfm?id=226200&

Hell, I live in Ann Arbor (another university town) and something like 90% of the people voted for Kerry - and we now how that turned out.

Andrew said...

I agree that Hanover is not representative of New Hampshire, in the sense that it is more left of center politically. Even so, this was a big event, and campaigns should be competing for visibility.

By the time the afternoon rolled around, and the campaigns all started to collect on the green, it seemed like Clinton supporters were at least equal in number to Obama supporters.