Obama Wins Indonesia and More Primary News

Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left at 10:15 AM on February 5, 2008.

* Obama wins 75% of the votes from Democrats abroad in Indonesia.

* Clinton is up by 10 in the latest SurveyUSA poll in California. There are lots of polls out there, but I have one piece of advice. Don't stake your hopes on Zogby, ever.

* I got this NAACP Presidential questionnaire filled out by Obama and Clinton. They have almost no policy disagreements, except Obama doesn't include green energy in his budget proposals. I find Michelle Obama's statements about whether she'd support Hillary Clinton in line with the general arrogance of the Obama campaign.

* The kids are loving this one (to your right) on the youtubes. It really is awesome, though not quite as good as 'You and I' by Celine Dionne.

* Be aware of the womenfolk. Cato at Dailykos discusses the Boston Obama rally with breathless excitement.

Walking past the thousands of people, I was immediately struck by how young everyone was. I would estimate that 75 percent of the crowd was under 35, and it may have even been higher than that. Many were clearly college kids (BU, Northestern, BC, Suffolk, Emerson, Umass Boston, and scads of community colleges are in the immediate vicinity). Of course this rally was taking place late at night on a Monday, so a lot of older people probably didn't feel like getting home at 12:30 AM like I just did. Anyway this bodes well for Obama because most MA polls are probably vastly under sampling these younger voters who have only unlisted cell phones, and who appear ready to hit the polls en masse tomorrow.

Young people have more time to go to rallies, so it's not clear to me that this is an advantage. Todd Beeton went to the Hillary town hall and he found it boring and oriented towards women. And I have certainly heard this a lot.

This event plus an anecdote from one of the morning shows yesterday that a woman received several Hillary mailers while her husband received none -- seems to me the Clinton campaign is counting on overperforming among women tomorrow. I predict the turnout among women will be astronomical and the gender gap large -- they always seem to come through for her when she's threatened and Barack certainly is an electoral threat to her.

There are also reports of empty seats at Obama events, so don't overestimate the pull of Obama.

* Sex workers are prepping for the conventions, though anecdotally the GOP Convention is better for business. Shocker.

* Jonathan Cohn notes that SEIU is going to spend $75M on health care politics and advocacy this cycle.

* I don't cover the delegate count process, so I'm going to suggest you read this nice Washington Post chart (via MyDD). Or stay tuned to OpenLeft, for Chris's analysis. His piece on superdelegates is making waves.

More soon. There was also a debate last night I attended between Donna Edwards and Al Wynn, which I know everyone is talking about right now.

Tagged as: clinton, obama, super tuesday

Matt Stoller is a political activist/blogger in DC, and was an editor at MyDD from November 2005 until June 2007. He also consults for the Sunlight Foundation, FreePress.net, and Working Assets as well as proactively networking other progressive bloggers/internet activists and progressive professionals.