A poll taken last night and today by CNN and WMUR in New Hampshire has Hillary and Obama tied at 33% each. The AP report on the poll is here.

Obama and Edwards are up 3 points from last week while Hillary is down 1 point.

Full poll results are here. (pdf)

There's a vast difference between Hillary and Obama on the experience question.

(DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY VOTERS ONLY:) Which Democratic candidate do you think has the right experience to be President?

Clinton 46%
Obama 14%
Edwards 13%

As to which candidate is most likely to bring change, the numbers are almost reversed: Obama 41%, Clinton 28%, Edwards 16%

Update [2008-1-5 18:16:37 by Big Tent Democrat]: Research 2000 shows a tie also: [More....]

ARG reflects a big Iowa bounce for Barack Obama:

Obama 38 (31)
Clinton 26 (35)
Edwards 20 (15)
Richardson 3 (5)

ARG claims that this reflected polling on the 4th and 5th. Today is the 5th. I have not heard of polling on Saturday mornings. That said, this is the bounce I expected. this would be Obama's best polling period. It will be interesting to see if Edwards goes up from here. Honestly, I do not see it at all. But I have been wrong before.

Bennett of ARG is predicting that 37% of the primary participants will be Independent. Obama wins them overwhelmingly. He splits Democrats with Hillary. This is where Hillary can do better imo. She needs to win Democrats convincingly. And she needs McCain to do better with Independents. McCain seems to be attracting much less of the Independent vote than Obama is. ARG has McCain in a big lead over Romney in NH based on a large lead among Republicans as well as Independents.

The DEA is about to hire 200 new special drug agents:

Michele M. Leonhart, DEA Acting Administrator, announced last week that the funding provided in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (H.R. 2764), will allow DEA to lift an agency-wide hiring freeze that was instituted in August 2006.

"This is an important and most welcome development," Leonhart said. "With this much-needed funding, DEA will be able to fill 200 Special Agent positions, as well as many vacant Intelligence Analyst and critical support positions. This legislation sends a strong and encouraging message to all of us at DEA as we continue our worldwide drug law enforcement mission."

President Bush signed H.R. 2764 into law on December 26, 2007. It provides funding for fiscal 2008, which began October 1, 2007.

The House vote on the bill is here and the Senate's here.

Both Hillary and Obama voted against the bill, although not for that reason. The DEA funding was but a tiny part.

This is good news all around. Good for Hillary for rejecting the awful advice from the Mark Penn contingent in her camp and good for Democrats - no need to run down the likely nominee:

The Hillary campaign, which has promised a sharpening of "contrast" between her and Obama in the days ahead, appears to have concluded that they won't be running any ads against Obama in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday

Here is some news for Penn - that won't work in South Carolina either.

Hilary needs to run a campaign focused on her strengths playing to her partisan base (in itself an implict contrast to Obama) and let the chips fall where they may. Win or lose, be proud of your campaign. She is better than a cheap, tawdry Mark Penn led campaign.

New Hampshire's Secretary of State Richard Gardner is predicting a record turnout for Tuesday's New Hampshire primary.

Gardner estimates 500,000 — or 60 percent of the 830,684 registered voters — will cast ballots....The most votes cast in a presidential primary — 396,385 — were cast in 2000.

Here's the stats on registered voters as of Friday:

Of the 830,684 on the voter list, 373,397 or 45 percent are undeclared; 243,914 or 29 percent are Republican; and 213,373 or 26 percent are Democrats.

As betweens Dems and Republicans, factoring in the undeclared voters: [More...]

From primary and caucus coverage, I like reading local news sources. Here's a group of New Hampshire print media sites with an online presence (courtesy of the Free State Project):

• the Seacoast Media Group, which publishes The Exeter News-Letter, The Hampton Union, Herald Sunday, The Portsmouth Herald, The Dover Community News, The York Weekly, The York County Coast Star, and The Rockingham News.
• Berlin Reporter (NE. NH),
• the Carroll County Independent (N. NH),
• the Concord Monitor,
• Coos County Democrat (N. NH),
• Courier-Littleton (N. NH),
• Foster's Online,
• Granite State News (E. NH),
• the Meredith News (Central NH),
• Nashua Telegraph (Nashua & S. NH),
• Record Enterprise (Central NH),
• the Union Leader, and
• the Valley News (Upper Valley).

The Zogby Tracker:

Clinton 32 (32)
Obama 28 (26)
Edwards 20 (20)
Richardson 7 (7)

In essence, a little Iowa movement to Obama. But this is Zogby so I do not trust him. He is already predicting big Iowa bounce. I hate a pollster who predicts what his own poll will do the next day. For a more serious poll, here is the Suffolk Tracker:

Clinton 36 (37)
Obama 29 (25)
Edwards 13 (17)
Richardson 4 (4)

As you can see, this poll is showing Iowa bounce. But all the bad news is for Edwards. Hillary has not dropped significantly yet. Indeed, if Hillary can hang on like she did the first night, she has a better shot than I would have thought. She has the debate tonight, which could easily halt the Iowa bounce.

Let me say this, I am surprised the Iowa bounce is not bigger already. This race in New Hampshire may be more up in the air than I thought. In the GOP race, Romney has MOVED UP since Iowa. Huckabee is up a bit but not much and McCain seems stagnant.

Maybe New Hampshire is poised to confound CW on the Iowa bounce.

Update [2008-1-5 12:41:24 by Big Tent Democrat]: Rassmussen does a one day poll last night and reports the results. Obama by 10.

In running through the Iowa results by county (map here, alphabetical list here), it's clear Obama outdid Hillary the most in the more densely populated urban areas like those around Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport. Comparing the counties where the vote numbers were in the thousands, like Johnson and Black Hawk, to Iowa as a whole using census results, there's some interesting numbers which could be bad news for Hillary in South Carolina -- an early voting state the media keeps saying will turn on the African American vote.

Iowa is mostly white, 95%. But the counties with thousands of voters and in which Obama trounced Hillary have higher percentages of non-white voters and fewer older voters.

For example, according to the census reports:

• Black Hawk County with 126,000 people is 8.1 percent African-American compared to the state wide African-American population of 2.1 %. It's white populaton is 89% compared to 94.6% state wide. 13.7% live below the poverty line (compared with 10.5% state wide). In yesterday's caucus vote, Black Hawk went 43% for Obama and only 28% for Hillary. Edwards came in third with 27%.

More....

I am not sure if this is for real or not but it does point to one of the biggest problems the Hillary Clinton campaign has - Mark Penn.

Instead of taking the obvious opening on the partisan Dem front, the Mark Penn contingent of the Hillary Clinton campaign apparently wants Hillary to attack Obama from the right. Not only would that be engaging in Right Wing politics, it is immensely stupid politics. In case Mark Penn does not know this, Hillary is running in a Democratic primary. Obama's vulnerability is with Democratic partisans.

As far as I can tell, these stupid tactics did not seep into Hillary's own campaigning or in any official campaign statements. It was just offered in background discussions with reporters. But that is bad enough.

If people are looking for a good reason to oppose Hillary, the association of Mark Penn with her campaign is as good a reason as any. He is horrible. He is bad for Democratic values. He is a terrible political consultant. His demise in the political world will be a good thing for Democratic politics.

Barack Obama got more of the vote in Iowa, but he didn't get much of a delegate bump. The delegate numbers work out to be:

• Obama 16
• Hillary 15
• Edwards 14

By contrast, Huckabee's Iowa vote win also translated into a big delegate win:

• Huckabee 30
• Romney 7

John Edwards has been touting his victory over Hillary today. The actual vote tally, with 100% of Iowa precincts reporting, shows he got more votes than her but by percentages:

• Edwards 29.7%
• Clinton 29.5%

I thought anything over .5% got rounded to the next number. Why aren't both Edwards and Hillary at 30%?

Comparing the Iowa county vote maps (same link as above, scroll down) it looks to me like both Hillary and Edwards had deep pockets of support in geographic areas -- they each won a lot of counties -- while Obama's support,although he won more counties than the other two individually, was more scattered around the state and included the more largely populated areas around Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport. (Alphabetical county list with vote tally here.) The Republican map on the other hand shows Huckabee decimated Romney all over the state, with the exception of a pocket on the east and west side of the state.

I don't think Obama ran away with Iowa. Hillary and Edwards did really well and if you put their numbers together, they surpass Obama's. Obama won, to be sure, but it's far from a mandate or a landslide like Huckabee got. And he did it without second choice voters like the Dems allowed.

Kevin Drum explains it well:

As long as we're laying our cards on the table, this is one of the things that keeps me on Hillary's side regardless of anything to do with issues or tactics or rhetoric or anything else. I just hate the idea that the fever swamp has been able to turn a perfectly decent liberal woman into such an object of malign loathing. If she loses, then she loses. But by God, I don't want her to lose because millions of Schiffren's fellow travelers have carried on a 15-year vendetta of sick-minded smears and hatred. Enough's enough.

Be against Hillary. Criticize her stances, actions and political style. But by gawd, the libelous things that get said about her, not just by Republicans, but by Democrats and especially, by the Media (See Tweety) just set my teeth on edge.

It is terrible that she will be defeated because of this. I did not want her to win for many reasons. Most of them due to her cautious approach to politics. But that is not why she is going to lose. It will be due to just plain untruths. And that is not right.

I know I am boring everyone to death with this but here is Ezra on Obama's stump speech in New Hampshire on the theory of change:

Spent the morning at an Obama rally in Concord. It was the first time in awhile that I've seen his stump speech, and it's much improved since my last exposure. There are long passages devoted to the sorts of criticisms I and others have made of his theories of change, and he now speaks much more concretely of a Mark Schmitt like approach: Occupying the moral high ground of unity and constructive outreach, converting individuals open to persuasion, and using those advantages to battle interests intent on protecting their privilege. The insurance, pharmaceutical, and oil industries get called out by name, as groups who Obama is aware will "protect their profits." He argues, explicitly, that we need to expand our public numbers to overwhelm such private intransigence. For those skeptical of the rhetoric of unity, it's a much more confidence inspiring stump.

Anyone know if the new stump speech is on YouTube somewhere? I'd love to see it. I have two observations on Ezra's observations.

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