{"id":5219,"date":"2007-05-28T12:56:12","date_gmt":"2007-05-28T12:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5219"},"modified":"2007-05-28T12:56:12","modified_gmt":"2007-05-28T12:56:12","slug":"the-democratic-primary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5219","title":{"rendered":"the Democratic primary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>State primaries are the only contests that really count for selecting a presidential nominee. The national population never weighs in, which notoriously means that people count for a lot more in New Hampshire than in, say, Maryland. Nevertheless, the candidates are surely interested in their standing among all Americans who register with their party. That&#8217;s partly because their level of national support will influence state primary voters. And it&#8217;s partly because the primary calendar is so compressed and unpredictable this year that it&#8217;s risky to rely on particular states.<\/p>\n<p>Here, then, is a graph showing support for Senators Clinton, Obama, and Edwards among likely Democratic voters nationwide. (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rasmussenreports.com\/public_content\/politics\/2008_democratic_presidential_primary__5\">Source for the data<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.peterlevine.ws\/images\/primary.JPG\"><\/p>\n<p>The three leading candidates have gained since January, at the expense of &#8220;don&#8217;t know\/undecided.&#8221; Senator Clinton quickly rose to the mid-30-percent range and has then had very stable support. Support for Senators Edwards and Obama has been more volatile and has sometimes traded-off. For example, during the third week of March, Obama gained at Edwards&#8217; expense, but then that trend reversed. It&#8217;s as if 35% of the Democratic electorate has settled on Senator Clinton, and the rest prefers an alternative&#8211;but hasn&#8217;t decided who that should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>State primaries are the only contests that really count for selecting a presidential nominee. The national population never weighs in, which notoriously means that people count for a lot more in New Hampshire than in, say, Maryland. Nevertheless, the candidates are surely interested in their standing among all Americans who register with their party. That&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}