A new Rasmussen poll of Iowa confirms that Barack Obama is enjoying a post-primary bounce across the country, leading John McCain 45%-38%, a solid margin with the poll's ±4% margin of error.
Iowa is a crucial battleground state that voted for Al Gore in 2000, but then narrowly switched to George W. Bush in 2004. A month ago, Obama led here by only 44%-42% in Rasmussen's polling.
His job now, of course, is to sustain his post-primary bounce, which is historically a tough job to perform.
In a further sign that Barack Obama is looking past the primary season and onward to the general election, the Obama campaign has announced that he'll be spending Tuesday night not in Oregon or Kentucky -- where primaries will be held that day -- but in Iowa.
The Obama campaign is very likely to clinch an overall majority of pledged delegates with Tuesday's contests, so the symbolism of his swing-state rally should be obvious: That he considers himself the popularly-elected nominee, and the race is on to fight John McCain.
Hillary Clinton's campaign has yet to announce where she will be on Tuesday.
John McCain has a new ad set to air in Iowa, contrasting McCain as a leader against the two Democrats who are still taking shots at each other:
"John McCain -- leadership, not politics," the announcers says. Of course, this ad may be just in time to be too late, as Barack Obama is in many ways looking past Hillary Clinton and already duking it out directly with McCain, as we saw yesterday.
The McCain seems to be making a big play for Iowa, where polling has shown him trailing Barack Obama. They have premiered this new ad, in which McCain promises to look out for people on economic issues:
"The great goal is to get the American economy running at full strength again," McCain says, "creating the opportunities Americans expect and the jobs Americans need."
The Hillary campaign was hoping, at a minimum, that tonight's two contests would more or less cancel each other out, thus keeping it not out of the realm of possibility that she could ultimately close the popular vote gap, including Florida, with a string of future wins.
Those hopes have been dealt a pretty severe blow tonight.
Not only were Indiana and North Carolina not a wash, but Obama's popular vote gains tonight have effectively wiped out her pop vote gains from her resounding win in Pennsylvania.
With 99% reporting in North Carolina, Obama is ahead by about 233,000 votes. Subtract from that the 20,000 that Obama is now trailing by in Indiana, with 92% reporting, and you have roughly a 213,000 gain for Obama.
Hillary won Pennsylvania by 214,000 -- a gain that has now been erased.
The battle between the two Dems over the "gas tax holiday" heated up on the trail today over Hillary's assertion that she was going to propose gas-tax-holiday legislation to see if members of Congress are "with us or against us" in battling the oil companies.
Obama claimed today that the "with us or against us" language had been borrowed from President Bush -- fightin' words indeed in a Dem primary.
Here's some audio of Hillary saying this on the trail last night...
Hillary, speaking of members of Congress, said: "I want them to tell us, are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies?"
Hillary's throwing down of the gauntlet here could increase pressure on members of Congress -- who are also the super-delegates she's courting -- to take a position on the gas tax.
Obama has decided to engage Hillary more directly in the gas-tax-holiday fight, releasing a second ad today responding to her earlier ad hitting him for his refusal to embrace the idea. And on the trail this morning, Obama sought to ridicule her remarks.
"She even borrowed one of President Bush's favorite phrases, and said that every member of Congress had to tell her -- `are they with us or against us?' Obama said.
It's unclear as yet how the issue is cutting politically in Indiana. Obama's decision to engage the issue more forcefully is inconclusive on this question. It could either reflect a belief that she's got him on the defensive on the issue, or a belief that it makes it easier to cast her as a pandering politician, or a bit of both.
For their part, the Hillary campaign says that their internal polling shows that her gas-tax-holiday talk is persuading working people that she identifies with the economic strain they're suffering. Full transcript of Hillary's remarks after the jump.
John McCain has a new ad airing in Iowa, featuring the candidate speaking to the camera and pitching his health care plan to voters in a key swing state -- an indication that McCain is looking to shore up his standing on domestic issues:
Iowa voted narrowly for Al Gore in 2000, then narrowly for President Bush in 2004, and polls this year have mostly shown McCain trailing Barack Obama and beating Hillary Clinton here. So no matter who the Democratic nominee ends up being, expect this state to be very closely contested.
The Iowa caucuses might have been over two months ago, but Barack Obama is still making gains off of them. In today's Iowa county Democratic conventions — which those caucus delegates were elected to participate in — Obama picked up the votes of roughly half of John Edwards' former supporters, netting him seven delegates.
Going into the June state Democratic convention, where the federal delegates will finally be selected, Obama is projected to have 23 delegates to Hillary Clinton's 14, with eight remaining delegates either still nominally for Edwards or uncommitted.
To put this in perspective, Hillary's total gains in the Ohio primary amounted to a net advantage of nine delegates.
Late Update: NBC News is now putting Obama's projected net delegate gain at five, not seven. The current numbers: Obama 23, Clinton 16, Edwards/Uncommitted 6. Still, it's hardly a bad day for Obama.
Late Late Update: The newest NBC projections give Obama 25 delegates, Clinton 14, and Edwards/Uncommitted 6. That's a gain of nine delegates for Obama since the January 3 precinct caucuses, and a loss of one for Clinton.
So with a few days of post-Iowa polling behind us, just how much of an effect have we seen in New Hampshire? A comparison between Zogby's pre-Iowa benchmarks and this morning's polls — which are composed of a pure post-Iowa sample over three days — gives the answer.
Obviously, Barack Obama has enjoyed a huge jump in the polls, but it turns out that Mitt Romney's Iowa defeat hasn't created any real benefit for John McCain:
John McCain may well win New Hampshire, but it wouldn't be because of any bounce in his favor — rather, it would be because of the absence of a bounce for Mitt Romney, who had been counting on one from an Iowa victory that never came.
With the candidates already stumping in New Hampshire, the thing to watch now is how Edwards and Hillary retool their approaches to adapt to the new political realities that have been created by Obama's seismic win last night.
"I am not the candidate of glitz; I am not the candidate of glamor," Edwards said. "I am the candidate who will fight with every fiber of my being every step of the way."
Edwards' approach now is to cast yesterday's results as simply a Hillary loss and a victory for an abstract desire for change, rather than a victory for Obama, as well as casting the rest of the contest as a head-to-head battle between himself and Obama for that change mantle. Hillary has been airbrushed from the picture, in Edwards' telling.
And as the above references to "glitz" and "glamor" suggest, Edwards wants this contest with Obama to shape up as, "Who can best deliver change -- a lover or a fighter?"
"We felt good for the last two weeks because we were so proud of what was happening on the ground. We were seeing the crowds, and so regardless of how the numbers played out exactly, we were really confident about us having changed how politics operated in this caucus. And it makes me very optimistic about the country. I think we can do it for the country as a whole."
Here you see the kernel of Obama's emerging post-Iowa case for his own national electability: The successes he had in Iowa in bringing new demographic groups into his coalition can be duplicated nationwide.
Relatedly, Chris Bowers compares the Iowa entrance polls from 2008 and 2004 and concludes that the new voters Obama brought out were almost all Democrats, not independents, and concludes that Obama won "on the back of the creative class vote" -- young and educated voters, and self-identifying liberals.
Here's another figure from the entrance poll: An astonishing 57% of caucusers were first-time participants. And how did they vote? Barack Obama carried them with 41% of the people going in and before second-choice reallocations, followed by Hillary Clinton at 29% and John Edwards at 18%.
And among the returning caucus-goers? Edwards was carrying them with 30%, with Obama at 26% and Hillary with 24%.
This tells us two things. First, Obama's strategy of bringing in new caucus-goers worked, the first time in recent history where such a strategy actually did so in the caucus. It's a big change from when Howard Dean tried it with less than impressive results. As for Edwards, his problem was that he fought the last war — if the caucus' turnout had been more like 2004, he may well have been the winner.
So how exactly did those much-coveted second-choice votes in the Iowa Caucus work out — did they deliver a victory for Obama through all these mysterious deals? The answer is actually pretty surprising. According to the entrance poll, which only measured first preferences of the participants going in, the numbers were: Obama 35%, Hillary 27%, Edwards 23%.
If we assume that the final state delegate numbers actually approximated the votes of the caucus participants, this means John Edwards was the big second-choice winner, as he boosted his final score by seven points, compared to only three points for Obama and two for Hillary. It was enough to just overtake Hillary for second place, but not enough for first — because it turned out that Obama entered as the clear winner from first choices alone.
John Edwards makes his interpretation as clear as you could possibly want: Though Edwards edged Hillary by a hair, tonight's results represent a rejection of Hillary, and all that's left is a contest between he and Obama.
"What happens now is we go to New Hampshire and other states, where the voters are going to have to decide who, between myself and Senator Obama, can best bring about change," Edwards says.
Separately, The New York Times reports that aides to Hillary say that Bill Clinton will spend the next five days campaigning intensively in New Hampshire on her behalf.
The numbers are final -- with all 1,781 precincts reporting, it's:
Obama: 37.58%
Edwards: 29.75%
Clinton: 29.47%
So, Edwards does come in second, and his team will be making the case that he beat Hillary, despite being outspent by a huge margin. The truth is that it couldn't have been closer, really. But the same reporters and commentators who portrayed this as a two person race -- Obama versus Hillary from the outset -- will now portray Hillary's virtual tie with Edwards for second place as a crushing loss to Hillary.
Edwards is currently speaking to his supporters, and he declared victory for second place over Hillary, though the full results aren't in.
Here's what's interesting: He interpreted tonight's results as meaning that "change won" -- and went on to characterize the rest of the contest as a fight over who is best suited to deliver change -- he or Obama.
Basically, he's arguing that he main significance of tonight's results is that Hillary lost, which obscures the fact that Obama won decisively over Edwards tonight and that Hillary is far from eliminated. But Edwards is arguing that this race is now about just the two men.
Edwards, his voice hoarse, said: "What happened tonight, is that the Iowa caucus goers said, `We want something different.'"
Earlier today there were reports that the Obama and Richardson camps had reached a deal where Richardson would throw his second-choice supporters to the Illinois Senator.
The Obama camp denied this today. But a little while ago, Obama adviser Samantha Power went on Fox and appeared to admit that such a deal had been reached, saying: "The fact that we got Richardson to basically say that his people should turn towards Obama ... "
But Richardson denied today that any such deal had been cut.
Right now, Hillary, Obama, and Edwards are basically in a statistical dead heat -- each has roughly 32%, with 513 of 1,751 precincts reporting.
A caveat: The small, rural precincts report first, which is why Edwards has been ahead for the early part of the evening. Now they're effectively tied, but it seems likely that the dynamic will shift soon...
Keith Olbermann just got off a good one-liner on Hillary's frequent expectations-depressing claim that an early poll showed her in "single digits" in Iowa.
Olbermann described it as "a poll done so long ago that no archaeological dig can manage to locate it."
MSNBC says that early entrance polls put Hillary and and Obama ahead of Edwards, a development that Tim Russert just said reflects the fact that independents, young people, and women are showing up in much bigger numbers than before.
