History > 2008 > USA > Politics (I)

In White House race,

it's delegates that count

Thu Jan 31, 2008
5:15pm EST
Reuters
By John Whitesides,
Political Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a hotly contested presidential race, votes are nice -- but it's delegates to this summer's nominating conventions that count.

While the Democratic and Republican presidential contenders dash coast-to-coast to hunt votes in 24 state contests on Tuesday, their campaign aides are focused on the state-by-state battle to accumulate convention delegates who select the nominee.

More than half of all Democratic delegates will be up for grabs on Tuesday, and about 40 percent of Republican delegates are at stake in the biggest single day of presidential primary voting in campaign history.

"It's useful to win states, but states don't vote -- delegates do," said Harold Ickes, who is heading up the delegate operation for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

"This is very much a race for delegates at this point," said Ickes, a longtime Clinton insider and aide to President Bill Clinton.

The delegate chase is particularly crucial for the Democratic contenders, Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who are running neck-and-neck for the right to represent the party in November's presidential election.

Unlike Republicans, Democrats distribute delegates among candidates in proportion to their vote statewide and in individual congressional districts. As a result, candidates can come away with big chunks of delegates even in states they lose.

In a tight race like the one between Clinton and Obama, the rules ensure no one is likely to get too big a lead and the battle is almost certain to extend to later contests in Virginia, Maryland, Wisconsin and beyond.

It could even extend to the August convention, when the delegates will cast their votes to elect the party's nominee -- although few party activists expect that to happen.

"In a two-candidate race, it's going to be very hard to deliver a knockout blow with elected delegates," Ickes said. "On the other hand, once someone gets a serious lead in delegates, it's going to be very hard to overtake them."

Democrats require 2,025 delegates to secure the party's presidential nomination. Republicans need 1,191 delegates to clinch the nomination.

The effect of the Democratic rules was evident in earlier state contests. While Clinton won the most votes in Nevada, Obama managed to win a projected 13 delegates to her 12 because of his strength in rural areas around the state.

Clinton also narrowly won New Hampshire, but the two candidates tied in delegates. Obama's win in Iowa gave him only one more projected delegate than Clinton.

"We're trying to do as well as we can in every state," said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who added next week's winner "will be very clear on February 6 in terms of the amount of delegates won."

REPUBLICANS DIFFERENT

Republican rules, in contrast, make many of their state contests winner-take-all, in which the top vote-getter corrals all of the state's delegates.

That could give Arizona Sen. John McCain, the front-runner among Republicans after his victory in Florida, an opportunity to take a prohibitive lead on Tuesday over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

California, the biggest prize in either party, is an exception for Republicans. It allocates delegates by congressional district, meaning Romney or former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee can lose the state to McCain but still pick up delegates if they do well in selected regions.

"If most people agree February 5 is a big delegate hunt, it puts us in a good position," said Romney spokesman Kevin Madden. "We're competitive in California and we have a lot of opportunities there."

The Democratic delegate picture also is complicated by the party's nearly 800 "super-delegates" -- members of Congress, governors and about 400 Democratic National Committee members who are not bound by vote results and can switch their allegiance at any time.

Both campaigns have made a heavy effort to woo those party insiders, and by most estimates Clinton has an early lead on Obama among them.

Tracking and courting those super-delegates is a one-on-one process involving phone calls, donors and whatever methods of persuasion work best, Ickes said.

"Delegate hunting is a unique operation where you talk to people, find out their concerns and talk it through with them," Ickes said.

"It's a very individualized, very tailored, very customized operation and we try to know as much about every super-delegate as possible before we go after them."
 

(Editing by David Wiessler)

In White House race, it's delegates that count, R, 31.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN3124420220080131?sp=true

News Analysis

For Giuliani, a Dizzying Free-Fall

January 30, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL and MICHAEL COOPER

Perhaps he was living an illusion all along.

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president took impressive wing last year, as the former mayor wove the pain experienced by his city on Sept. 11, 2001, and his leadership that followed into national celebrity. Like a best-selling author, he basked in praise for his narrative and issued ominous and often-repeated warnings about the terrorist strike next time.

Voters seemed to embrace a man so comfortable wielding power, and his poll numbers edged higher to where he held a broad lead over his opponents last summer. Just three months ago, Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s affable senior policy adviser, surveyed that field and told The New York Observer: “I don’t believe this can be taken from us. Now that I have that locked up, I can go do battle elsewhere.”

In fact, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was about to begin a free fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking. Mr. Giuliani finished third in the Florida primary on Tuesday night; only a few months earlier, he had talked about the state as his leaping-off point to winning the nomination.

As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign. He allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign.

He accumulated a fat war chest — he had $16.6 million on hand at the end of September, more than Mitt Romney ($9.5 million) or Senator John McCain ($3.2 million) — but spent vast sums on direct mail instead of building strong organizations on the ground in South Carolina and New Hampshire.

Indeed, his fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, a state where he was once considered competitive, provided an early indication of his vulnerability.

And, curiously, this man with the pugnacious past declined to toss more than light punches at his Republican opponents.

In interviews Tuesday, even before he gave a concession speech in which he spoke of his campaign in the past tense, Mr. Giuliani described his strategic mistakes, suggesting that his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand; he in fact competed hard in New Hampshire, to remarkably poor effect.

Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him.

Mr. Giuliani was a temple-throbbing Italian-American New Yorker who ruled a cacophonous city seen as the very definition of liberalism. He was somewhat liberal on social issues — notably immigration and abortion — where Republican candidates are invariably conservative. And he possessed a complicated family life: he has been thrice-married and has two adult children who rarely speak to him. At the beginning of his campaign last spring, he sat for a celebrity photo shoot smooching with his third wife, who snuggled in his lap.

“It bordered on science fiction to think that someone as liberal on as many issues as Rudy Giuliani could become the Republican nominee,” said Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant who has been a longtime critic of the former mayor. “Rudy didn’t even care enough about conservatives to lie to us. The problem wasn’t the calendar; it was the candidate.”

Several of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign aides acknowledged as much Tuesday. They say he tried to tack right without ever really convincing voters that he had experienced a change of heart. And an adviser who has known Mr. Giuliani since the early 1990s and spoke on condition of anonymity said the mayor’s early poll numbers struck him as ephemeral.

“His numbers were built on name recognition and celebrity,” this adviser said. “He had so many of his old friends around him, sometimes it was like he was running for president of Staten Island.”

In his concession speech Mr. Giuliani acknowledged, jokingly, how out of place he often seemed among conservative Republicans. “We’re a big party and we’re getting bigger,” he said. “I’m even in this party.”

After his third-place finish, Republican officials said Mr. Giuliani was expected to drop out of the race and endorse Mr. McCain, possibly as early as Wednesday.

In the beginning, few cracks were evident in the Giuliani campaign machine. He led the Republican field in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News throughout the summer, as his support peaked in August at 38 percent nationally in a four-way fight with Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Fred D. Thompson. That put him 20 points ahead of his next closest competitor, Mr. Thompson, who has since dropped out of the race.

Mr. Giuliani often played to large crowds in New Hampshire and through the Deep South; everyone seemed to love his tough talk on terrorism. When Mr. McCain’s campaign nearly flat-lined last summer, as he ran low on money, Mr. Giuliani seemed poised to take advantage.

No candidate last summer sent out as many direct-mail appeals in New Hampshire as Mr. Giuliani. Last fall, the campaign also broadcast its first television commercials there, ultimately spending more than $3 million on advertisements, and dispatched Mr. Giuliani there for lots of retail campaigning in a state where voters tend to worry more about taxes and the military than conservative social issues. And he seemed at peace with this choice.

“It is not inconceivable that you could, if you won Florida, turn the whole thing around,” Mr. Giuliani told The Washington Post in late November on a bus trip through New Hampshire. “I’d rather not do it that way. That would create ulcers for my entire staff and for me.”

But Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was stumbling, even if it was not immediately evident. He leaned on friendly executives who would let him speak to employees in company cafeterias. Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain, by contrast, compiled lists of undecided Republican voters and invited them — sometimes weeks in advance — to town-hall-style meetings.

“Rudy Giuliani had a tremendous opportunity in New Hampshire that his campaign never embraced,” said Fergus Cullen, the state Republican chairman. “They vacillated between being half committed and three-quarters committed, and that doesn’t work up here.”

Mr. Giuliani also relied on a New York-style approach to photo-friendly crowds. “Rudy went very heavy on Potemkin Village stops, working what I call ‘hostage audiences,’ “ Mr. Cullen said. “It looked like he was campaigning, but he didn’t know who he was talking to.”

A curious new vulnerability also arose. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani took much joy in crawling through the weeds of policy debate, flashing his issue mastery. But as a presidential candidate, he as often seemed ill at ease.

Mr. Giuliani once embraced gun control, gay rights and abortion rights; he knew that all of these issues would be a tough sell to Republicans. While he never shifted positions as sharply as Mr. Romney — who renounced his former support of abortion and gay rights — he as often occupied a muddled middle ground that pleased no one.

This became most evident in the first Republican debate. Asked about repealing Roe v. Wade, he was equivocal. “It would be O.K. to repeal,” he said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”

Later, he said that the decision on abortion should be left to women — but that he would appoint strict constructionist judges of the type who had favored overturning Roe v. Wade.

“Give him credit — he sort of stuck to his positions,” Mr. Warfield said. “It made him a man of principle, but it won’t make him the Republican nominee.”

Storm clouds swept over the Giuliani campaign in October and November. A federal prosecutor indicted his friend and former police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik. And a report indicated that Mr. Giuliani had spent city money to visit his girlfriend, now his wife, in the Hamptons; the police also provided some security for his new love.

Cause and effect is difficult to chart in a presidential campaign. Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers did not fall off the table, but the news gave newly wary voters another reason to reconsider him.

By late fall, Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers were fading in New Hampshire, and he trailed Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain. He began a curious two-step, saying he would compete in but probably not win in New Hampshire.

Weeks earlier, he had executed a similar tactical retreat in South Carolina — he and his campaign strategist, Mike DuHaime, said that they hoped voters would cast ballots for him, but that they did not necessarily expect to win the state.

That was a tough pitch in states where voters pride themselves on being taken seriously by candidates.

“DuHaime comes out and says it’s all about delegates, rather than winning the state,” Mr. Cullen said. “It was amazing. It was the talk of every Dunkin’ Donuts and rotary club.”

By late December, Mr. Giuliani made a fateful decision. He formally abandoned plans to run hard in and perhaps win New Hampshire or Michigan. Instead, he made sporadic appearances in those states and retreated to Florida, where he would make something of a final stand.

This was a deeply controversial move; no one had won an election by essentially skipping the first four or five caucuses and primaries. With this decision, he consigned himself to the media shadows during weeks of intensive coverage. But Mr. DuHaime, who had run President Bush’s effort in the Northeast in a past election, signed off on it, as did Mr. Giuliani’s other top campaign aides.

In the end, Mr. Giuliani and his advisers treated supporters as if they were so many serried lines of troops. If they tell a pollster in November that they are going to vote for you, this indicates they are forever in your camp, their thinking went.

But politics does not march to a military beat; it is a business of shifting loyalties. By Tuesday night, even those voters who rated terrorism as the most important issue were as likely to vote for Mr. Romney or Mr. McCain as for Mr. Giuliani. And those who had voted early for Mr. Giuliani now felt a sense of irrelevance.

“I’ve already voted; I voted for Mr. Giuliani,” David Brown, 70, said in Sun City Center, Fla. “I wish I’d voted for Mr. Romney.”

So Mr. Giuliani confronts the hardest of choices, as he finished far behind two other candidates in a state he had vowed to win. Some of his former aides, particularly those who hail from his days at City Hall, have urged him to slog on to New York, New Jersey and California on Feb. 5.

But there, too, the ground is shifting. Only weeks ago, Mr. DuHaime spoke in a call about the former mayor’s strong lead in those states. “Some of these leads are momentum-proof at this point,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani now trails or is at best tied in polls in all of those states. And soon after that phone call, reporters received a memorable e-mail rebuttal from Mr. Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.

“Mayor Giuliani’s momentum-proof national polling lead, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all walk into a bar,” it began. “You’re right. None of them exist.”

Dalia Sussman and Russ Buettner contributed reporting.

For Giuliani, a Dizzying Free-Fall, NYT, 30.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/politics/30giuliani.html?hp

McCain Defeats Romney in Florida Vote

January 30, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER and MEGAN THEE

MIAMI — Senator John McCain defeated Mitt Romney on Tuesday to win the delegate-rich Florida primary, solidifying his transformation to the Republican front-runner and dealing a devastating blow to the presidential hopes of Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Republican officials said after Mr. Giuliani’s distant third-place finish that he was likely to endorse Mr. McCain, possibly as early as Wednesday in California. They said the two candidates’ staffs were discussing the logistics of an endorsement.

The results were a decisive turning point in the Republican race, effectively winnowing the field to Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney, two candidates with very different backgrounds who have little affection for one another but share a similar challenge in winning over elements of the party suspicious of their ideological credentials.

While most of the attention in Florida was on the Republicans, Democratic voters gave Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a victory in a virtually uncontested race. The Democratic Party had stripped the state of its delegates as a punishment for moving its primary earlier in the year, and the leading candidates refrained from campaigning there.

Mr. McCain’s victory showed he could win among Republican voters. Florida allows only registered Republicans to vote in its primary, unlike New Hampshire and South Carolina, where Mr. McCain’s victories earlier this month were fueled by independent voters.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Mr. McCain had 36 percent of the vote, Mr. Romney 31 percent, Mr. Giuliani 15 percent and Mike Huckabee 14 percent.

“Our victory might not have reached landslide proportions,” Mr. McCain said, “but it is sweet nonetheless.”

After a campaign in which he was often on the attack, Mr. McCain went on to praise his rivals, especially Mr. Giuliani, who he said had “invested his heart and soul in this primary, and who conducted himself with all the qualities of the exceptional American leader he truly is.”

Mr. Romney made clear that he would go all-out in the coming week, as the presidential race builds toward its biggest day so far, a set of more than 20 contests across the country on Tuesday. He and Mr. McCain fought an increasingly bitter battle in Florida, and they now seem likely to take their messages to the national stage, with Mr. Romney trying to portray Mr. McCain as out of step with his party on critical issues and ill-equipped to deal with the economic downturn and with Mr. McCain suggesting that Mr. Romney’s principles yield too easily to the political winds and that he cannot be trusted on national security.

The meaning of Mr. McCain’s victory starts with the trove of 57 delegates it brings him, the bounty of a winner-take-all contest and the biggest prize of the campaign to date. But it also gives him a chance to start persuading his party to put aside the deep internal divisions that have been exposed by the campaign and begin coalescing around him.

Mr. Romney was having none of it. He continued to call for change in Washington and got in what sounded like another swipe at Mr. McCain when he said America needed a president who had “actually had a job in the real economy.”

Surveys of voters leaving polling places painted a picture of how successful each campaign was. They found that Mr. McCain not only did significantly better than Mr. Romney among voters who listed the war as their top concern, but also did better than him with voters who said they were most concerned about the economy.

Mr. Romney did significantly better than Mr. McCain among voters who said they were most concerned about immigration.

Both candidates now face the challenge of rallying the fractured party establishment and grass-roots conservatives behind them — or at least not around their opponent.

Mr. McCain, of Arizona, emerges from Florida with an opportunity to get back to where he was at the beginning of this roller-coaster of an election season: the anointed front-runner. Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose early goals of winning Iowa and New Hampshire were thwarted, wanted to show he could prevail in a competitive election somewhere outside his native Michigan so he could battle on in the week to come.

But the outcome could be decisive for Mr. Giuliani, who suffered lopsided losses in all the early voting states this year and had staked his candidacy on a strong showing in Florida, where he campaigned more than anywhere else and outspent his rivals on television advertisements over the last month.

Exit polls showed that Mr. Giuliani did not even have a clear edge among voters who were most concerned about his signature issue, terrorism; incomplete returns Tuesday night showed him narrowly finishing ahead of Mr. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who barely campaigned in Florida.

Mr. Giuliani, speaking in Orlando, thanked his supporters and talked about his campaign in the past tense but did not drop out of the race. “The responsibility of leadership doesn’t end with a single campaign,” he said in a serious, gracious speech that he leavened with a humorous asides. “If you believe in a cause, it goes on and you continue to fight for it, and we will. I’m proud that we chose to stay positive and to run a campaign of ideas.”

Surveys of voters leaving the polls found that nearly half of Republican voters listed the economy as the most important issue in exit polls, while 21 percent said terrorism, 16 percent immigration and 14 percent the war in Iraq.

Four in 10 Republican voters said illegal immigrants working in the United States should be deported, while about 3 in 10 said they should be allowed to stay as temporary workers, and the same number said they should be offered a chance to apply for citizenship. Mr. McCain was supported by a plurality of those who favored citizenship, and Mr. Romney by those who favored deportation.

Hispanics, who made up more than one-tenth of the Republican voters, said they were more inclined to favor a guest-worker program over deportation. Forty-three percent of them said illegal immigrants should be allowed to remain in the United States as temporary workers, while one-third said they should be offered the opportunity to apply for citizenship. Only one-fifth of Hispanic Republicans said they favored deporting illegal immigrants.

Mr. McCain, who last spring supported the immigration proposal that would have created a guest-worker program and a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, won roughly half the Hispanic vote. Mr. Giuliani, who strongly courted Cuban-Americans in the Miami area, won about one-quarter of the Hispanic vote, and Mr. Romney, who took the hardest line on illegal immigration, finished a distant third.

Mr. McCain may have been helped with some Hispanic voters by the endorsement he gained last week from Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida. An even bigger surprise endorsement, by the popular Republican governor, Charlie Crist, also appeared to help him.

More than 4 in 10 voters said Mr. Crist’s endorsement of Mr. McCain was important to them, and just over half of them voted for Mr. McCain.

The exit poll was conducted throughout the state by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool with 1,505 Republican primary voters. To take into account the large number of early and absentee voters in Florida, Edison/Mitofsky conducted a pre-election telephone poll and included those results with the opinions of the voters exiting polls on Tuesday.

Mr. McCain, who ran a more negative campaign than usual against Mr. Romney in the last few days, praised Mr. Romney and his supporters in his victory speech, saying, “The margin that separated us tonight surely isn’t big enough for me to brag about or for you to despair.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting from Miami; Michael Powell from Orlando, Fla.; and Michael Luo from St. Petersburg, Fla.

    McCain Defeats Romney in Florida Vote, NYT, 30.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/politics/30florida.html

Clinton Wins in Florida,

but Without Any Delegates

to Sweeten the Victory

January 30, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

MIAMI — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Florida Democratic primary on Tuesday, a contest that generated extraordinary voter interest even though the result will have no practical impact because no delegates were at stake.

With 95 percent of the vote counted, Mrs. Clinton, of New York, was running ahead of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, 50 percent to 33 percent. Former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina was third, with 14 percent.

None of the Democratic candidates campaigned actively here, fulfilling a pledge to the Democratic National Committee, which punished Florida Democrats for jumping the line by scheduling their primary before Feb. 5. But supporters of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama worked hard to get their voters to the polls to make a symbolic show of strength.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory was expected and may have largely reflected her prominence on the national political scene for almost two decades. She did well among those who cast their votes early; among late deciders, Mr. Obama matched her almost one for one, according to exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky.

Mrs. Clinton flew late Tuesday to Fort Lauderdale from Washington, and in nearby Davie she thanked more than 1,000 supporters in a banquet room for a “tremendous victory.” She was also seeking to reach Florida’s television audience, which did not see any of the Democratic candidates before the primary because they pledged not to campaign here.

“Thank you so much, oh my goodness, thank you,” she said to cheers. “You know, I could not come here to ask in person for your votes, but I’m here to thank you for your votes today.”

Mrs. Clinton noted the record turnout of Florida Democratic primary voters in her remarks, and promised that, despite the lack of a formal campaign here, “all of your voices will go with me” if she was elected president.

She told the audience that she would withdraw American troops from Iraq, improve relations with Central and South American nations, and “continue to support democracy in Cuba.”

She said that by waiting until the polls closed to land in Florida she was obeying party rules.

But some Obama supporters denounced Mrs. Clinton’s act as cynical and urged voters and journalists to dismiss Florida as a meaningless beauty contest.

“The bottom line is that Florida does not offer any delegates,” said Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic nominee for president. “It is not a legitimate race.”

Dyeimia Johnson, 26, of Lauderhill, Fla., a town northwest of Fort Lauderdale, said she was aware that, technically speaking, her vote did not count.

“I’m still a Democrat, and I believe in the visions of Barack and Hillary,” Ms. Johnson said, without revealing for whom she had voted. “So it’s my right as a citizen, and I’m here to express it.”

Mrs. Clinton had strong support among women, Hispanics, whites, older voters, early deciders and early voters in Florida. A majority of Democratic voters said she was the most qualified to be commander in chief, and a plurality said she was the most likely to unite the country.

Mr. Obama received the support of 7 in 10 black voters, but they made up less than 20 percent of the electorate. He did better among younger voters than older ones, but they did not support him as strongly as they had in earlier primaries, and he was unable to best Mrs. Clinton among them.

Mark Bubriski, communications director for the state Democratic Party, said the huge turnout showed the enthusiasm Democrats here had for the candidates and the prospect of reclaiming the White House after eight years of Mr. Bush.

“Florida is a microcosm of the nation,” he said. “On Feb. 5 we have the closest thing to a national primary we’ve ever had in the United States. This is the last opportunity for voters in any state to have their voices heard before the whole country votes.”

Mr. Bubriski said that he believed that ultimately Florida’s 210 delegates would be seated at the national convention this summer, but that it would be up to the national party’s credentials committee to determine how they would be allocated.

The party penalized Michigan, too, for voting before Feb. 5 by withholding its delegates. Mrs. Clinton “won” that race, on Jan. 15, but she was the only one of the major Democratic contenders whose name was on the ballot.

But no matter what happens at the convention, voters here on Tuesday were determined to make their choices felt.

Ruth Weiss, 80, a transplanted New Yorker who lives in Sunrise Lakes, said she cast her ballot for Senator Clinton. “It probably will count eventually, and this is an indication of who we think should be president,” she said of herself and her husband, Manny, who also voted for Mrs. Clinton.

William Perry, 77, of Lauderhill, called the state and national parties’ spat “stupid.”

“Why punish your own party?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

He said he had been vacillating between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama but decided in the last two days to support Mr. Obama.

“What tipped me was the way Bill Clinton was going after him,” said Mr. Perry, a retired banker who is black. “That just put the icing on the cake for me. I think he did more damage than he did good. He should have let her run her own campaign.”
 

Reporting was contributed by Jeff Zeleny from El Dorado, Kan.; Patrick Healy from Davie, Fla.; Dalia Sussman from New York; and Carmen Gentile and Cristela Guerra from Florida.

    Clinton Wins in Florida, but Without Any Delegates to Sweeten the Victory, NYT, 30.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/us/politics/30dems.html

Obama Cites Diversity of Voters in Win

January 27, 2008
Filed at 1:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- An exultant Barack Obama said his overwhelming win in South Carolina disproved notions that Democratic voters are deeply divided along racial lines.

''We have the most votes, the most delegates, and the most diverse coalition of Americans we've seen in a long, long time,'' the Illinois senator told joyful supporters at a rally. ''They are young and old; rich and poor. They are black and white; Latino and Asian.''

As if anticipating his remarks, his supporters chanted ''Race doesn't matter'' before Obama took the stage in Columbia, and again as he spoke for 20 minutes.

Obama praised runners-up Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards without naming them. But he took a veiled shot at the sometimes edgy comments made by the former first lady and former President Clinton in recent days.

''We're looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington,'' Obama said. ''And right now, that status quo is fighting back with everything it's got; with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face.''

''We are up against the idea that it's acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election,'' Obama said. ''We know that this is exactly what's wrong with our politics. This is why people don't believe what their leaders say anymore. This is why they tune out. And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again.''

The crowd repeatedly chanted, ''Yes we can!''

With wins in heavily white Iowa and in South Carolina, where about half of Saturday's voters were black, Obama said he has proven he can win in any region.

He said he wants to disprove ''the assumption that young people are apathetic'' and ''the assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate; whites can't support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can't come together.''

Even as he spoke, Obama got a boost from Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy.

''Over the years, I've been deeply moved by the people who've told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president,'' she wrote in the Sunday's edition of The New York Times. ''That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.''

After his speech, Obama flew to Macon, Ga., where he planned to attend a church service Sunday before campaigning in Birmingham, Ala. He planned to return to Washington to attend President Bush's State of the Union address Monday night.

    Obama Cites Diversity of Voters in Win, NYT, 27.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obama.html

News Analysis

His Mettle Tested, Obama May Emerge Still Stronger

January 27, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Senator Barack Obama proved in South Carolina on Saturday that he could not only endure everything the Clinton campaign threw at him in the most confrontational week of the presidential contest so far but also draw votes across racial lines even in a Southern state.

Still, his victory came in part because Mr. Obama was able to turn out large numbers of black voters, a dynamic that will not necessarily prove as decisive in the 22 states that hold nominating contests on Feb. 5.

And his share of the white vote in South Carolina, 24 percent, was lower than what he drew in Iowa or New Hampshire, raising questions about whether race will divide Democrats even as the party shows tremendous enthusiasm for its candidates.

If the South Carolina result buoyed the Obama team, it left Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign facing a new set of questions. Her advisers’ steady attacks on Mr. Obama appeared to prove fruitless, if not counterproductive, and the attack-dog role of former President Bill Clinton seemed to have backfired.

Surveys of voters leaving the polls showed that many Democrats who believed that Mr. Clinton’s role in the campaign was important ended up voting for Mr. Obama.

Last week, Clinton advisers believed Mr. Clinton was rattling Mr. Obama and drawing his focus away from his message of moving beyond the politics of the 1990’s and the Bush presidency. The results on Saturday indicated, instead, that voters were impressed with Mr. Obama’s mettle and agreed with him that the Clintons ran an excessively negative campaign here.

“The criticism of Obama ended up really helping him going forward, I think,” said Congressman James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an influential black Democrat who remained neutral in the primary. “If he ends up winning the nomination, he will definitely face an onslaught of attacks this fall, and he may look back on South Carolina as the place that toughened him up.”

In his victory speech Saturday night, Mr. Obama indeed sounded like a candidate with a cause, saying that the fight for South Carolina produced not only a personal victory but also progress over the divisive politics of the past. His target was clear enough without his naming names.

Yet the race is about to shift in a big way, moving from the state-by-state battle it has been to competition on a national scale. Mr. Obama has some opportunities in Feb. 5 states, among them Georgia and Tennessee, to win over large swaths of black voters as he did in South Carolina.

But like Mrs. Clinton, he will have to show appeal in a wide variety of states — some with liberal Democratic bases, including New York and California, and some more moderate, like Kansas; some with racially diverse populations, and some that are predominantly white.

The third Democratic candidate, John Edwards, seemed like a fading force on Saturday night, although he won decisively among one group, white male voters. While he vowed to go on after four straight losses, a major question is whether voters who might have otherwise aligned with him might choose between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Having failed to win even in South Carolina, where he was born and where he won in 2004 when he was running for president, Mr. Edwards faces the challenge of convincing voters that in going on he is doing more than just seeking influence within the party by amassing delegates that he can eventually throw behind one of his rivals.

Mrs. Clinton may have won the last two nominating contests, in New Hampshire and Nevada, but she is now left to decide whether she needs to reassess her strategy.

South Carolina voters showed little taste for the Clintons’ political approach. They said in exit polls that their main concern was the economy; during an all-out campaign blitz on behalf of his wife here, Mr. Clinton spent the last week highlighting Mr. Obama’s record on Iraq and his recent statements about the transformational nature of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers were minimizing the importance of South Carolina even before polls closed, saying the primaries in Florida on Tuesday and in the swath of states on Feb. 5 were more important. But she will have to reckon with the rejection of her candidacy by black voters and the mixed support she received from white Democrats and younger voters here — two groups that she must have by her side in order to build a cross-section of support in the coming contests.

“The Clintons will now have to deal with a perception of hollowness about her strategy, that she is leaving it to her husband to take care of things and allowing him to overshadow her political message,” said Blease Graham, a professor of political science at the University of South Carolina.

Tellingly, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton left South Carolina on Saturday night for two states that, like this one, have moderate political constituencies that do not often embrace Democrats in presidential general elections. Mrs. Clinton flew to Tennessee to hold a rally with black voters in Nashville, while Mr. Obama was headed to Georgia.

If South Carolina is any guide, the sizable numbers of black voters in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee could help Mr. Obama in the Feb. 5 primaries. And his victory Saturday may stir fresh excitement among voters there and in his home state, Illinois, as well as in other places where he is building support, like California and even Mrs. Clinton’s political base in New York.

He also has bragging rights about a new coalition of support. About as many South Carolina white men voted for Mr. Obama as for Mrs. Clinton, and about 70 percent of white voters said they would be satisfied if Mr. Obama won the Democratic nomination, according to exit polls was conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and the Associated Press.

More than half of black voters in the state said the country was definitely ready for a black president, while only about a quarter of white voters reached the same conclusion. By contrast, about one-third of both South Carolina whites and blacks said the country is definitely ready for a women president, the exit polls showed.

“Obama’s victory will leave him with some strong talking points — especially that he can continue to expand his voting base into a conservative Southern state,” said Professor Graham. “His team comes out of this able to say that he’s acceptable to white Southern men. And the Clintons come out of this facing questions about how their attack strategy seemed to fail.”
 

Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.

    His Mettle Tested, Obama May Emerge Still Stronger, NYT, 27.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/us/politics/27assess.html?hp

Obama Carries South Carolina by Wide Margin

January 27, 2008
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY and MARJORIE CONNELLY

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Senator Barack Obama won a commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, drawing a wide majority of black support and one-quarter of white voters in a contest that sets the stage for a multistate fight for the party’s presidential nomination.

In a bitter campaign here infused with discussions of race, Mr. Obama’s convincing victory puts him on equal footing with Mrs. Clinton — with two wins each in early-voting states — and gives him fresh momentum as the contest plunges into a nationwide battle over the next 10 days.

Former Senator John Edwards, a native of South Carolina who was trying to revive his candidacy, came in third place but vowed to keep his campaign alive, despite failing to win a single state so far.

With 99 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mr. Obama had 55 percent of the vote, Mrs. Clinton had 27 percent, and Mr. Edwards had 18 percent.

“Tonight, the cynics who believed that what began in the snows of Iowa was just an illusion were told a different story by the good people of South Carolina,” Mr. Obama told a euphoric crowd here after the results came in. “After four great contests in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time.”

Mr. Obama did not mention his rivals by name, but alluded to his challenges ahead. “We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together,” he said. As the crowd cheered, he added: “It’s the kind of partisanship where you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea — even if it’s one you never agreed with. That kind of politics is bad for our party, it’s bad for our country.”

Shortly after the polls closed, Mrs. Clinton flew to Tennessee to hold a campaign rally as she looked ahead to the next round of contests. Her concession came in the form of a brief statement: “We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the 22 states, as well as American Samoa, who will vote on Feb. 5.”

The candidates are now taking their campaigns to states like California and New York for contests that hold vast numbers of delegates and will test their already strained budgets. But Mrs. Clinton’s statement suggests that her hopes also rest partly on Florida, which holds its primary Tuesday. The state has been stripped of its delegates because the vote is being held earlier than party rules allow, and the Democrats are not campaigning there.

As Mr. Obama’s supporters gathered in a downtown convention center here and Mrs. Clinton was on the plane to Tennessee, former President Bill Clinton gave what amounted to the campaign’s concession speech, a reflection of how he emerged as the proxy candidate as his wife campaigned in other states. In that address, at a rally in Missouri, he said of Mr. Obama: “Hillary congratulated him, and I congratulate him. Now we go to Feb. 5, when millions of Americans can finally get into the act.”

Mr. Edwards’s third-place finish raised new questions about the future of his candidacy. While he says he is intent on carrying on, he campaigned heavily in South Carolina and won this state in 2004. His failure to draw more support here raises questions about his long-term ability to capture votes among those thought to be his base. But he could play the role of delegate-collecting spoiler in the fight between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton.

South Carolina was selected by Democratic leaders to hold one of the opening contests in the nominating season to add racial and geographic diversity to the traditional opening states of Iowa and New Hampshire. With 45 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, split by Congressional district, it is the biggest prize so far. The South Carolina Democratic Party estimated that Mr. Obama would get 25 delegates, Mrs. Clinton would get 12, and Mr. Edwards would get 8.

The voting took place at the conclusion of a weeklong campaign, where issues were interwoven with discussions of race. A poignant reminder of South Carolina’s historic racial divide, the Confederate flag, swayed in the cool breeze on Saturday only a few yards from where supporters waved placards for Mr. Obama, who if elected would become the nation’s first black president.

“I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to a diverse crowd of supporters. “I saw South Carolina.”

Turnout on Saturday was estimated at a record 530,000 people, nearly 100,000 more than in the Republican primary a week ago. More than half of the Democratic voters were African-American, and surveys of voters leaving the polls suggested that their heavy turnout helped propel Mr. Obama to victory.

Mr. Obama, who built an extensive grass-roots network across the state over the last year, received the support of about 80 percent of black voters, the exit polls showed. He also received about one-quarter of the white vote, with Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards splitting the remainder.

In particular, Mr. Obama was helped by strong support from black women, who made up 35 percent of the voters. Mrs. Clinton, with the help of her husband, had competed vigorously for black women voters, but Mr. Obama received about 80 percent of their support, according to the exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press.

A heightened anxiety about the nation’s economy was at the center of the primary fight here. More than half the voters said it was the most important issue facing the country, overtaking health care or the war in Iraq.

“This election is about the past versus the future,” Mr. Obama said at his victory rally in a stark portrayal of his political challenge. “It’s about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today, or whether we reach for a politics of common sense and innovation — a shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.”

With victories in New Hampshire and Nevada for Mrs. Clinton and in Iowa and South Carolina for Mr. Obama, it appeared increasingly likely that the party’s presidential nominating fight could extend well beyond Feb. 5. Even before the ballots were counted on Saturday evening, campaign workers were being dispatched to new assignments in points across the country.

Here in South Carolina, Mrs. Clinton was supported by about 3 in 10 women over all, the exit polls showed, hampering a candidacy that is depending on female support to win states. She received support from 4 in 10 white women and 2 in 10 black women. She had competed aggressively for their vote, particularly African-Americans to offset Mr. Obama’s advantages.

White voters under the age of 40 divided their support, with almost 40 percent for Mr. Obama, and about 3 in 10 each for Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton. Almost 80 percent of blacks under the age of 40 voted for Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards divided white voters age 40 and older equally, with about 40 percent each, according to exit polls. Among older blacks, 80 percent supported Mr. Obama.

The South Carolina primary was the first contest of the year in which race rose to the forefront. While Mr. Obama seldom directly mentioned the historic nature of his candidacy, it was not lost on the thousands of voters who turned out to see him in all regions of the state.

    Obama Carries South Carolina by Wide Margin, NYT, 27.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/us/politics/27carolina.html?hp

Earmarks Likely to Continue, but With Details

January 22, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Bush is unlikely to defy Congress on spending billions of dollars earmarked for pet projects, but he will probably insist that lawmakers provide more justification for such earmarks in the future, administration officials said Monday.

Fiscal conservatives in Congress and budget watchdogs have been urging Mr. Bush to issue an executive order instructing agencies to disregard the many earmarks listed just in committee reports, not in the text of legislation.

More than 90 percent of earmarks are specified that way, not actually included in the texts. White House officials say such earmarks are not legally binding on the president.

Congressional leaders of both parties, who are scheduled to meet on Tuesday with the president, said Mr. Bush would provoke a huge outcry on Capitol Hill if he ignored those earmarks.

Lawmakers, including the House Republican whip, Roy Blunt of Missouri, have cautioned the White House that a furor over earmarks could upend Mr. Bush’s hopes for cooperation with Congress on other issues, including efforts to revive the economy.

Moreover, Republicans shudder at the possibility that a Democratic president might reject all their earmarks.

In effect, the White House is avoiding a clash with Congress over specific projects while preserving the president’s ability to demand a further reduction in earmarks generally.

A band of Republican lawmakers led by Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona and Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina has attacked earmarks, saying they waste money and corrupt the legislative process. But a larger number of lawmakers avidly seek them and boast of success in securing money for constituents. Republicans received about 40 percent of the earmarks in the spending bills for 2008.

A new tally by the White House Office of Management and Budget shows that the 2008 spending bills signed by Mr. Bush include more than 11,700 earmarks, totaling $16.9 billion. By the White House count, the number was down 1,754 from 2005, and the amount of money was down $2.1 billion, or 11 percent.

Using different definitions, some groups have come up with different figures, showing a larger decline in the dollar value of earmarks. Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog, estimates the reduction at 25 percent, half the goal set by Mr. Bush.

The earmarks for this year set aside money for museums and bicycle trails, control of agricultural pests like the emerald ash borer beetle and aid to specific military contractors producing items like missiles, munitions and “merino wool boot socks.”

Mr. Bush recently mocked earmarks for a prison museum in Kansas and a sailing school in California.

Nearly one-fifth of the earmarks and more than one-third of the money were in the Defense Department appropriations bill.

On Dec. 20, Mr. Bush instructed Jim Nussle, director of the Office of Management and Budget, to “review options for dealing with the wasteful spending” in earmarks.

At the same time, 19 groups urged Mr. Bush to shut “the Congressional favor factory” by directing agencies to disregard earmarks tucked into committee reports.

“Such an action is within your constitutional powers and would strike a blow for fiscal responsibility,” said a letter from the groups, which included the American Conservative Union, the National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The groups pressed their case in a recent meeting with Barry Jackson, a top aide to the president, but they said they received no assurances.

In his State of the Union message last year, Mr. Bush said: “Over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate. They are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn’t vote them into law. I didn’t sign them into law. Yet, they’re treated as if they have the force of law. The time has come to end this practice.”

White House lawyers have found many court decisions holding, as the Supreme Court said in 2005, that “restrictive language contained in committee reports is not legally binding.”

The comptroller general, the nation’s top auditor, and the Congressional Research Service agree with that position, as a matter of law. But in setting forth that view in a 1993 case, the Supreme Court observed, “An agency’s decision to ignore Congressional expectations may expose it to grave political consequences.”

Mr. Blunt, the Republican whip, said that any White House actions were likely to be prospective, setting standards for future earmarks. The purpose, he said, would be to ensure that a project “meets the criteria the taxpayers want it to meet before the money is distributed.”

Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a coalition of taxpayer groups, said he expected the White House to establish rules and procedures to screen out “the most egregious earmarks.”

The sponsor of an earmark might, for example, be required to provide a written justification, including requests for the money from local officials, universities or companies that would benefit.

Presidential candidates should be asked whether they would keep such standards, Mr. Norquist said.

Even in Alaska, long dependent on federal largess, officials are trying to wean the state off earmarks. In her State of the State address last week, Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican, said, “We cannot and must not rely so heavily on federal government earmarks.”

    Earmarks Likely to Continue, but With Details, NYT, 22.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/washington/22earmark.html

FACTBOX: State contests ahead and stakes for candidates

Tue Jan 22, 2008
5:15pm EST
Reuters

(Reuters) - Here is a list of the upcoming U.S. presidential nominating state primaries and caucuses and what is at stake for candidates in the days and weeks ahead.

* January 26: South Carolina (Democratic primary). The outcome will be closely watched to see whether Hillary Clinton wins again over Barack Obama, which would be a blow to the Illinois senator's bid to be the Democratic nominee. A Clinton win in the state with a predominantly black Democratic electorate would add to the New York senator's victory in Nevada over the weekend, putting her out front in the race. Previously the two leading candidates had split contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Edwards, who has placed a distant third in the early opening rounds, is counting on a win in the state he was born in to stay alive. He will face very long odds if he again loses.

* January 29: Florida (Republican primary; Democrats are not contesting the state because of dispute with national party.) Rudy Giuliani has put all his resources and time into this contest, hoping to benefit from the large population of Northeasterners who have relocated to the warm Southern state and his tough theme of national security. It is an important test for the former New York mayor, who bypassed earlier contests to concentrate on Florida and has largely faded from view as those contests grabbed the headlines. The voting is also key for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose sole win so far has been in Iowa, where a strong evangelical turnout fueled his surprise victory. Since then he has failed to turn in another win, losing to Sen. John McCain in South Carolina Saturday. Polls show McCain leading the pack as well in Florida with voting just a week away. Don't count out former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who added Nevada to his win list Saturday and has remained in the race and has the resources to stay in.

* February 1: Maine (Republican) One more chance for Republicans to score a win in advance of the Super Tuesday matchup of 22 states. Few candidates will have the resources to make major plays in array of major voting centers.

* Super Tuesday, February 5: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho (Democratic), Illinois, Kansas (Democratic), Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana (Republican), New Jersey, New Mexico (Democratic), New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia (Republican). Once thought to be the definitive date on the political calendar, when nominees in each party would be clearly determined, the picture is far more muddled now by the number of candidates who have staked wins in different places. The sheer number of contests on this day could give the legitimate contenders plenty of opportunities to find a win somewhere and move on. However, a candidate who picks up many victories across the country -- especially in the big states like California and New York -- could be on his or her way to the nomination. A number of candidates have connections to these states: McCain represents Arizona in the Senate, Huckabee was former governor of Arkansas, Obama is from Illinois, Romney was a former governor of Massachusetts and Clinton and Giuliani are from New York.

* February 9: Louisiana, Kansas (Republican), Washington.

* February 10: Maine (Democratic)

* February 12: District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia. These races a week after Super Tuesday now loom as potentially important contests if no decisive victor in either party has emerged.

* February 19: Hawaii (Democratic), Wisconsin. Same holds true for these contests a week later.

* March 4: Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont. If there is no clear winner by now, this could be another potentially decisive round with the two large states of Texas and Ohio voting.

While no one is ready to predict the races will extend to this summer's nominating conventions, a prolonged campaign would put a premium on candidates with the money to endure and the staff to parachute into states that so far have been largely ignored.

Once one party settles on a candidate, pressure could build on weaker contenders in the other party to drop out and avoid a lingering primary fight.
 

Source: National Association of Secretaries of State for calendar, Reuters correspondents

(Editing by David Wiessler)

    FACTBOX: State contests ahead and stakes for candidates, R, 22.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2248965720080122

Romney Wins Convincing Michigan Victory

January 16, 2008
Filed at 6:31 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

DETROIT (AP) -- Mitt Romney scored his first major primary victory Tuesday, a desperately needed win in his native Michigan that gave his weakened presidential candidacy new life. It set the stage for a wide-open Republican showdown in South Carolina in just four days.

Three GOP candidates now have won in the first four states to vote in the 2008 primary season, roiling a nomination fight that lacks a clear favorite as the race moves south for the first time.

The former Massachusetts governor defeated John McCain, the Arizona senator who was hoping that independents and Democrats would join Republicans to help him repeat his 2000 triumph here. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, trailed in third, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson is making a last stand in South Carolina.

''It's a victory of optimism over Washington-style pessimism,'' Romney said in an Associated Press telephone interview from Southfield, Mich., echoing his campaign speeches and taking a poke at McCain, the four-term senator he beat. ''Now on to South Carolina, Nevada, Florida.''

Minimizing the significance of Tuesday's vote, McCain said he had called Romney to congratulate him ''that Michigan welcomed their native son with their support.''

''Starting tomorrow, we're going to win South Carolina, and we're going to go on and win the nomination,'' McCain declared, also in an AP interview from Charleston, S.C.

Huckabee, too, already campaigning in the next primary state, predicted in Lexington, S.C., he would ''put a flag in the ground here Saturday.'' He also jabbed at Romney, who has poured at least $20 million of his personal fortune into his bid: ''We need to prove that electing a president is not just about how much money a candidate has.''

In Michigan, with most precincts reporting, Romney had 39 percent of the vote, McCain had 30 percent and Huckabee 16 percent. No other Republican fared better than single digits.

Previously, Huckabee had won leadoff Iowa, and McCain had taken New Hampshire. Romney won scarcely contested Wyoming.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the only top contender on the Democratic ballot Tuesday. With most precincts counted, she had 56 percent of the vote to 39 percent for uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Romney's ties to Michigan proved beneficial.

Four in 10 voters said his roots factored into their decisions, and 58 percent of that group backed him, according to preliminary results from surveys of voters as they left their polling places, taken for The AP and the networks. He also led among voters who said the economy (42 percent) and illegal immigration (39 percent) were their most important issues, and won the most Republicans (41 percent), conservatives (41 percent), evangelicals (34 percent) and voters looking for a candidate with experience (52 percent) or shared their values (37 percent).

McCain had an edge with those who wanted an authentic president (43 percent), and he won among moderates (40 percent), independents (35 percent) and Democrats. But fewer non-Republican voters participated in the GOP primary this year than in 2000 when those voters helped him beat George W. Bush. Independents and Democrats accounted for roughly one-third of the vote, compared with about one half eight years ago.

Romney had a slight edge over McCain as the candidate likeliest to bring needed change, 32 percent to 28 percent.

The economy proved the most important issue for Republicans in Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation and an ailing auto industry. Given four choices, 55 percent of Michigan Republican primary voters picked the economy as the most important issue, while 17 percent picked Iraq, 13 percent immigration and 11 percent terrorism.

A mere 20 percent or less of eligible voters were expected to show up at polling stations across frigid and snowy Michigan, the turnout depressed in part by the Democratic race of little to no consequence.

For Republicans, the stakes varied.

Of the three candidates competing hard here, Romney needed a Michigan victory the most to invigorate a campaign crippled by searing losses in Iowa and New Hampshire. He was the only one who watched the voting returns in Michigan; his top Michigan opponents, McCain and Huckabee, campaigned in the state earlier in the day but left by afternoon to plant themselves in next-up South Carolina.

Up for grabs in Michigan were 30 Republican delegates.

Romney campaigned in the state far more than his rivals and spent more than $2 million in TV ads in Michigan, nearly three times what McCain did, according to an analysis of presidential advertising by the nonpartisan Michigan Campaign Finance Network. McCain paid for more than $740,00 in ads and Huckabee spent more than $480,000.

Feeling optimistic in the run-up to the Michigan voting, Romney went back on the air with TV ads in South Carolina after a brief hiatus.

A muddle from the start, the GOP race has grown ever more fluid as the first states voted over the past two weeks.

Romney was second to Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses and to McCain in New Hampshire's primary while Huckabee dropped to third. Thompson is camping out in South Carolina looking for his first win. Rudy Giuliani is doing the same in Florida, which votes Jan. 29.

The former New York mayor got only 3 percent of the Michigan vote, trailing Thompson and Texas Rep. Ron Paul as well as the top three, and he hasn't fared better than fourth in any of the states so far. Yet, the fractured GOP field plays into his strategy of lying in wait -- and making his move -- in Florida in the run-up to Feb. 5 when some two dozen states vote.

Romney was born and raised in Michigan, and his late father, George, was head of American Motors and a three-term governor in the 1960s. The younger Romney announced his presidential candidacy in the state a year ago.

McCain had a built-in advantage of his own. He won the state's primary eight years ago on the strength of independent and Democratic-crossover voters, and he still had a network of hard-core backers. Six months after his campaign nearly collapsed, he now leads national polls.

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, had hoped to stage a surprise finish with the support of Christian evangelicals who live in the more conservative, western part of the state. With his populist pitch, Huckabee also wanted to do well in Reagan Republican country outside of Detroit.

The economy dominated the weeklong Michigan campaign. The state has been reeling from the U.S. auto industry's downturn and has the nation's highest unemployment rate at 7.4 percent.

Michigan doesn't typically hold its primary until February but state party officials scheduled it earlier to try to give the state more say in picking a president. The Republican National Committee objected and cut the number of Michigan delegates to the national convention by half as punishment while the Democratic National Committee stripped the state of all 156 delegates to its national convention, including 28 superdelegates who would not have been bound by the outcome of the primary.

--------

Liz Sidoti reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jim Kuhnhenn and Alan Fram in Washington, Libby Quaid in Warren, Mich.; David Eggert in Traverse City, Mich., and Sara Kugler in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., contributed to this report.

    Romney Wins Convincing Michigan Victory, NYT, 16.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Republican-Rdp.html

Analysis: Washington Is Punching Bag

January 12, 2008
Filed at 10:52 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pity poor Washington.

Business as usual in the nation's capital has been a target of ridicule by nearly all presidential candidates in a race in which change has become the mantra. Those who know how to navigate the Beltway and those who don't have been criticizing the status quo and presenting themselves as agents of change.

''We're tired of the same old same old,'' says Republican Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.

''I have 35 years of experience making change,'' insists Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, the two-term New York senator.

This rampant beating up on Washington ways -- something of an acrobatic feat for longtime D.C. players such as Clinton and four-term Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona -- could have unintended consequences for both major parties as the races heat up with no clear front-runner on either side.

As the rancor toward Washington grows, voters could become turned off and discouraged, opening the way to a serious independent or third-party presidential bid, according to some political practitioners.

''At the heart of it is this feeling that we're paralyzed,'' said former Democratic Sen. David Boren, now the president of the University of Oklahoma.

Last week, Boren hosted a forum on electoral alternatives, including third-party runs. The main speaker was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the multibillionaire who has been toying with the idea of an independent bid for some time. Several rumored running-mate prospects for Bloomberg such as Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., also were present. All the participants railed against Washington's partisan gridlock.

Presidential candidates have been running as outsiders and decrying the Washington establishment since Andrew Jackson captured the White House in 1828.

Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter ran as an outsider in 1976 and seized the White House from President Ford, a longtime establishment figure. In 1980, Carter was deposed, in turn, by then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who also waged an outsider's campaign. Minor strains of the same theme were sounded by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992 when he unseated the first President Bush; and even by Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 in his campaign against Vice President Al Gore.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama has long portrayed himself as an apostle of change while his principal rival, Clinton, emphasizes her long support for reform. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards calls himself ''the people's candidate'' and decries corporate interests and the role of money in politics.

Self-described change agents on the Republican side are Romney, McCain, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and actor and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson. In other words, pretty much the whole field.

Why is Washington such a favorite target? What's wrong with Washington any way?

''People have stopped working together, government is dysfunctional, there's no collaborating and congeniality,'' contends Bloomberg, who has begun detailed polling and sophisticated voter analysis in all 50 states as he weighs an independent bid, according to associates.

Part of the antiestablishment rhetoric this year is in response to ''the frustration people have with politics-as-usual and speaks directly to the openness that the electorate would have to a third-party candidate,'' said Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, who did polling for President Clinton and, more recently, for Bloomberg's mayoral races.

''Given the level of public dissatisfaction that exists, it makes sense that candidates emphasize that they are agents of change,'' Schoen said. For those who are already part of the Washington establishment such as McCain and Clinton, it's important ''to present themselves as mavericks outside the conventional way of doing business.''

Schoen said the fact that neither Obama nor Huckabee could parlay their Iowa caucuses victories into wins in New Hampshire shows how unsettled the races remain in both major parties. Clinton and McCain were the New Hampshire victors.

Pat Choate, an economist who was Ross Perot's 1996 running mate, said that anti-Washington sentiment this year ''cuts across the board, although the individual candidates are dissatisfied with different things.''

He said conditions may be more conducive to an independent run now than when the Texas billionaire ran in 1992 and 1996 in part because there's no incumbent on the ballot.

The absence of clear front-runners, especially among Republicans, ''is going to ultimately result in a great deal of negativism. People hate that,'' Choate said.

Alan J. Lichtman, a political history professor at American University who unsuccessfully ran for Senate last year in Maryland as a Democrat, said running against Washington is an old tradition that ''has its failures and its successes.'' But he said despite the current wholesale demonizing of Washington, he thinks it is unlikely to sow the seeds for a meaningful third-party run.

''On the Democratic side, they're pretty happy with their choices. And on the Republican side, I think the Republicans will find someone they're reasonably happy with. Maybe McCain,'' Lichtman said.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Tom Raum has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1973, including five presidencies.

    Analysis: Washington Is Punching Bag, NYT, 12.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scorning-Washington.html

Clinton Is Victor, Turning Back Obama; McCain Also Triumphs

January 9, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and MICHAEL COOPER

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York rode a wave of female support to a surprise victory over Senator Barack Obama in the New Hampshire Democratic primary on Tuesday night. In the Republican primary, Senator John McCain of Arizona revived his presidential bid with a Lazarus-like victory.

The success of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain followed their third- and fourth-place finishes in the Iowa caucuses last week. Mrs. Clinton’s victory came after her advisers had lowered expectations with talk of missteps in strategy and concern about Mr. Obama’s momentum after his first-place finish in Iowa. Her team is now planning to add advisers and undertake a huge fund-raising drive to prepare for a tough and expensive fight with Mr. Obama in the Democratic nominating contests over the next four weeks.

Mr. McCain had pursued a meticulous and dogged turnaround effort: his second bid for the White House was in tatters last summer because of weak fund-raising and a blurred political message, leading him to fire senior advisers and refocus his energy on New Hampshire.

Several New Hampshire women, some of them undecided until Tuesday, said that a galvanizing moment for them had been Mrs. Clinton’s unusual display of emotion on Monday as she described the pressures of the race and her goals for the nation — a moment Mrs. Clinton herself acknowledged as a breakthrough.

“I come tonight with a very, very full heart, and I want especially to thank New Hampshire,” Mrs. Clinton, who is seeking to become the first woman to be elected president, told supporters in Manchester. “Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.”

“I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I am so gratified you responded,” Mrs. Clinton said. Then, echoing her husband’s “Comeback Kid” speech after his surprise second-place finish in the primary here in 1992, she added, “Now together, let’s give America the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me.”

The scene was noticeably different from the one in Iowa when Mrs. Clinton spoke after her loss in the caucuses. Instead of being surrounded by longtime Clinton supporters like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, she went on stage with teenagers and young adults behind her.

Mr. Obama leaves here with political popularity that is still considerable, after his victory in Iowa and his growing support in the nominating contests ahead. Mrs. Clinton had been struggling to stop Mr. Obama, turning on Tuesday to new advisers to shore up her campaign team, and both of them are strongly positioned heading into the Nevada caucuses on Jan. 19 and the South Carolina primary a week later.

“We know the battle ahead will be long,” Mr. Obama told supporters in Nashua Tuesday night. “But always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.”

With 91 percent of the electoral precincts reporting, Mrs. Clinton had 39 percent of the vote, Mr. Obama 36 percent, and John Edwards 17 percent. On the Republican side, Mr. McCain had 37 percent, Mr. Romney 32 percent and Mike Huckabee 11 percent.

The New Hampshire results foreshadow a historic free-for-all for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations in the weeks to come. Mr. McCain’s victory dealt another serious blow to Mitt Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts. Mr. Romney campaigned hard and spent heavily as he sought wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, only to come up short in both states.

Mr. McCain, after watching television reports of his victory in his Nashua hotel room, took congratulatory calls from Mr. Romney and Mr. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Republican caucus in Iowa. He then went downstairs to declare victory.

To cheers of “Mac is back,” Mr. McCain told supporters last night: “My friends, you know I’m past the age when I can claim the noun ‘kid,’ no matter what adjective precedes it. But tonight, we sure showed them what a comeback looks like.”

Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, devoted considerable financial resources to Iowa and New Hampshire, and his advisers said they planned to spend carefully in the coming contests. He has a major fund-raiser scheduled for Wednesday night in Manhattan — Mrs. Clinton’s home turf — and intends to seek donations from online donors and major party figures. He is also seeking endorsements from members of the Senate and labor groups that have thus far been torn between him and Mrs. Clinton.

The voting in New Hampshire did little to clarify the muddied Republican field. The McCain, Romney and Huckabee campaigns are all girding for battle, and some political analysts still see Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee as a wild card in Southern primaries. Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose strategy calls for winning big in later states like Florida and the Feb. 5 primaries in New York, New Jersey and California, finished near the back of the pack here.

Mr. Romney, stoically smiling in remarks to supporters Tuesday night, is now looking ahead to Michigan primary on Jan. 15; he grew up in the state, where his father was a popular governor, and has been advertising on television there since mid-December.

“Another silver,” Mr. Romney, who ran the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, said in his concession speech. He went on to call for sending someone to Washington “who can actually get the job done,” and added, “I don’t think it’s going to get done by Washington insiders.” He vowed to fight on.

Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Thompson are hoping for a huge lift from fellow Southerners in the South Carolina primary on Jan. 19. And Mr. Giuliani, speaking to supporters before flying to Florida, said the toughest fights were still to come. “By the time it’s over with, by Feb. 5, it’s clear that we’re going to be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Mr. Giuliani said. He added that, perhaps, “we’ve lulled our opponents into a false sense of confidence.”

Mrs. Clinton plans to stay off the campaign trail on Wednesday and huddle with her husband and advisers about the way forward. She is planning to add new strategists and advertising advisers to her team, including a longtime aide, Maggie Williams, and advertising adviser, Roy Spence, as she seeks to build on a strategy memorandum written by another ally, James Carville, to show more fight and grit against Mr. Obama in Nevada.

Even before polls had closed Tuesday, advisers to Mrs. Clinton were portraying her performance here as a gratifying revival and surprise, given her loss in Iowa and Mr. Obama’s double-digit lead in some public opinion polls going into Tuesday’s vote. Advisers and female voters pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s emotional moment on Monday as decisive, with advisers promising that voters would see more personal touches in the days to come.

“Women finally saw a woman — perhaps a tough woman, but a woman with a gentle heart,” said Elaine Marquis, a receptionist from Manchester, who had been torn between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton but was leaning her way when she bared her feelings.

Exit polls of voters on Tuesday showed that women, registered Democrats, and older people — especially older women — came out solidly for Mrs. Clinton, while independents, men and younger voters went for Mr. Obama.

It was an especially remarkable night for Mr. McCain, who had to lay off much of his staff after he nearly ran out of money because of his effort to run a national campaign last spring along the lines of President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. All but counted out, Mr. McCain retrenched and focused his limited resources largely on advertising and campaigning in New Hampshire, where he enjoyed a reservoir of support among Republicans and independents from his 2000 run here.

He got back on his emblematic bus, the Straight Talk Express, chatting with the few reporters who continued to cover him and working to persuade the state’s voters one by one in a seemingly incessant stream of town-hall-style meetings.

And while Mr. Romney outspent him on television commercials by two to one — spending $8.7 million to Mr. McCain’s $4.3 million, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising — Mr. McCain closed the gap in the last days of the campaign here, in part because of his tireless campaigning.

Mike Dennehy, who directed the McCain efforts in the state, estimates that Mr. McCain spoke to some 25,000 people directly.

Exit polls suggested that there was a record turnout, with half a million voters — 280,000 Democrats and 230,000 Republicans.

In the Republican primary, Mr. McCain got 38 percent of voters unaffiliated with either party, and the same proportion of registered Republicans, according to exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press. Such undeclared voters made up about a third of voters in the Republican primary.

It was different for the Democrats. Undeclared voters make up a larger share of the voters in the Democratic primary — about 40 percent. Mr. Obama got about 4 in 10 undeclared voters and Mrs. Clinton got about a third of their support. Mrs. Clinton got 45 percent of registered Democrats, and Mr. Obama got a third.

Marjorie Connelly and Michael Powell contributed reporting.

    Clinton Is Victor, Turning Back Obama; McCain Also Triumphs, NYT, 9.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/us/politics/09elect.html?hp

FACTBOX: Profiles of presidential hopefuls

Tue Jan 8, 2008
2:05am EST
Reuters

(Reuters) - Leading candidates in the race for the November 2008 U.S. presidential election are seeking to become the first woman, first black, first Mormon or oldest first-term president to occupy the White House.

Following are brief profiles of the main contenders:
 

DEMOCRATS:

HILLARY CLINTON, 60, would be the first woman U.S. president. Is a senator from New York and was first lady when her husband, Bill, was president from 1993 to 2001. Has emphasized efforts to insure 47 million Americans without health coverage and criticized opponents for lack of experience. Has led most national opinion polls by double digits but finished third in Iowa and trails in New Hampshire.

JOHN EDWARDS, 54, is a former one-term senator from North Carolina and was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2004. Has made combating poverty a major campaign theme. Called his vote to authorize military action in Iraq a mistake and now urges withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. His wife, Elizabeth, is being treated for a recurrence of cancer.

BARACK OBAMA, 46, is a first-term U.S. senator representing Illinois and would be the first black president. Gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention before he was elected to the Senate. Has opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and has tried to cast himself as a Washington outsider. Won in Iowa and leads Clinton in New Hampshire polls, but trails nationally.
 

REPUBLICANS:

RUDY GIULIANI, 63, is a former New York mayor and has tried to boost his candidacy by speaking repeatedly about his leadership during the September 11 attacks. Widely shunned by many conservatives because of his support for abortion rights, gun control and gay rights, but received endorsement from Christian evangelist Pat Robertson. Has led most national polls but is behind in early primary voting states.

MIKE HUCKABEE, 52, is a bass-playing former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister from Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of Bill Clinton. Won the Iowa caucus thanks to strong support from fellow evangelicals, who admire his religious beliefs and conservative stances on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Known for his wit, but criticized for lack of knowledge on foreign policy.

JOHN MCCAIN, 71, a senator from Arizona, attended the U.S. Naval Academy and was shot down in 1967 over Vietnam. Would be the oldest first-term president, at 72, if elected. Spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. Has been a pro-business conservative and abortion foe. Supports the Iraq war and argued for additional troops to quell the violence. Slowed by staff turnover and overspending in early days of his campaign but now leading in New Hampshire.

MITT ROMNEY, 60, is a Harvard-educated former Massachusetts governor and business executive who co-founded the private equity firm Bain Capital. Has tried to cast himself as a more conservative alternative, opposing gay rights and abortion rights although he once supported both. Romney, whose father sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, would be the first Mormon president. Finished second in Iowa and now trails McCain in New

 Hampshire, though he topped polls in both states for much of 2007.

(Writing by Jeremy Pelofsky, Paul Grant and Andy Sullivan in Washington)

    FACTBOX: Profiles of presidential hopefuls, R, 8.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0217857420080108?virtualBrandChannel=10003

FACTBOX: Calendar of U.S. presidential primaries

Mon Jan 7, 2008
3:23pm EST
Reuters

(Reuters) - Here is a calendar of the 2008 U.S. presidential nominating state primaries and caucuses. In some states, the contests are nonbinding and separate caucuses or conventions are scheduled to select delegates to the national conventions.

JANUARY 2008

* January 3: Iowa

* January 5: Wyoming (Republican)

* January 8: New Hampshire

* January 15: Michigan

* January 19: Nevada, South Carolina (Republican)

* January 26: South Carolina (Democratic)

* January 29: Florida

FEBRUARY 2008

* February 1: Maine (Republican)

* February 5: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho (Democratic), Illinois, Kansas (Democratic), Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico (Democratic), New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah

* February 9: Louisiana, Kansas (Republican)

* February 10: Maine (Democratic)

* February 12: District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia

* February 19: Hawaii (Democratic), Washington, Wisconsin

According to staff with Hawaii's Republican Party, the party is not technically conducting a presidential primary or caucus. Delegates will be selected during a week-long period tentatively ending February 7.

MARCH 2008

* March 4: Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont

* March 8: Wyoming (Democratic)

* March 11: Mississippi

APRIL 2008

* April 22: Pennsylvania
 

MAY 2008

* May 6: Indiana, North Carolina

* May 13: Nebraska, West Virginia

* May 20: Kentucky, Oregon

* May 27: Idaho (Republican)

JUNE 2008

* June 3: Montana, New Mexico (Republican), South Dakota

AUGUST 2008

* August 25-28: Democratic National Convention in Denver

SEPTEMBER 2008

* September 1-4: Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

Note: The Kansas State Legislature opted not to fund a presidential primary election in 2008; parties will hold caucuses instead.

Source: National Association of Secretaries of State

(Writing by Paul Grant, Washington Editorial Reference Unit; Editing by David Wiessler)

    FACTBOX: Calendar of U.S. presidential primaries, R, 7.1.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0217356820080107?virtualBrandChannel=10003

Can You Count On These Machines?

January 6, 2008
The New York Times
By CLIVE THOMPSON

This article will appear in this Sunday's issue of the magazine.

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.”

Indeed, in a more sanguine political environment, this level of error might be considered acceptable. But in today’s highly partisan and divided country, elections can be decided by unusually slim margins — and are often bitterly contested. The mistrust of touch-screen machines is thus equal parts technological and ideological. “A tiny number of votes can have a huge impact, so machines are part of the era of sweaty palms,” says Doug Chapin, the director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group that monitors voting reform. Critics have spent years fretting over corruption and the specter of partisan hackers throwing an election. But the real problem may simply be inherent in the nature of computers: they can be precise but also capricious, prone to malfunctions we simply can’t anticipate.

During this year’s presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren’t backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don’t?

“The issue for me is the unknown,” Platten told me when we first spoke on the phone, back in October. “There’s always the unknown factor. Something — something — happens every election.”

NEW VOTING TECHNOLOGIES tend to emerge out of crises of confidence. We change systems only rarely and in response to a public anxiety that electoral results can no longer be trusted. America voted on paper in the 19th century, until ballot-box stuffing — and inept poll workers who lost bags of votes — led many to abandon that system. Some elections officials next adopted lever machines, which record each vote mechanically. But lever machines have problems of their own, not least that they make meaningful recounts impossible because they do not preserve each individual vote. Beginning in the 1960s they were widely replaced by punch-card systems, in which voters knock holes in ballots, and the ballots can be stored for a recount. Punch cards worked for decades without controversy.

Until, of course, the electoral fiasco of 2000. During the Florida recount in the Bush-Gore election, it became clear that punch cards had a potentially tragic flaw: “hanging chads.” Thousands of voters failed to punch a hole clean through the ballot, turning the recount into a torturous argument over “voter intent.” On top of that, many voters confused by the infamous “butterfly ballot” seem to have mistakenly picked the wrong candidate. Given Bush’s microscopic margin of victory — he was ahead by only a few hundred votes statewide — the chads produced the brutal, monthlong legal brawl over how and whether the recounts should be conducted.

The 2000 election illustrated the cardinal rule of voting systems: if they produce ambiguous results, they are doomed to suspicion. The election is never settled in the mind of the public. To this date, many Gore supporters refuse to accept the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s presidency; and by ultimately deciding the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court was pilloried for appearing overly partisan.

Many worried that another similar trauma would do irreparable harm to the electoral system. So in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which gave incentives to replace punch-card machines and lever machines and authorized $3.9 billion for states to buy new technology, among other things. At the time, the four main vendors of voting machines — Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart — were aggressively marketing their new touch-screen machines. Computers seemed like the perfect answer to the hanging chad. Touch-screen machines would be clear and legible, unlike the nightmarishly unreadable “butterfly ballot.” The results could be tabulated very quickly after the polls closed. And best of all, the vote totals would be conclusive, since the votes would be stored in crisp digital memory. (Touch-screen machines were also promoted as a way to allow the blind or paralyzed to vote, via audio prompts and puff tubes. This became a powerful incentive, because, at the behest of groups representing the disabled, HAVA required each poll station to have at least one “accessible” machine.)

HAVA offered no assistance or guidelines as to what type of machine to buy, and local elections officials did not have many resources to investigate the choices; indeed, theirs are some of most neglected and understaffed offices around, because who pays attention to electoral technology between campaigns? As touch-screen vendors lobbied elections boards, the machines took on an air of inevitability. For elections directors terrified of presiding over “the next Florida,” the cool digital precision of touch-screens seemed like the perfect antidote.

IN THE LOBBY OF JANE PLATTEN’S OFFICE in Cleveland sits an AccuVote-TSX, made by Diebold. It is the machine that Cuyahoga County votes on, and it works like this: Inside each machine there is a computer roughly as powerful and flexible as a modern hand-held organizer. It runs Windows CE as its operating system, and Diebold has installed its own specialized voting software to run on top of Windows. When the voters tap the screen to indicate their choices, the computer records each choice on a flash-memory card that fits in a slot on the machine, much as a flash card stores pictures on your digital camera. At the end of the election night, these cards are taken to the county’s election headquarters and tallied by the GEMS server. In case a memory card is accidentally lost or destroyed, the computer also stores each vote on a different chip inside the machine; election officials can open the voting machine and remove the chip in an emergency.

But there is also a third place the vote is recorded. Next to each machine’s LCD screen, there is a printer much like one on a cash register. Each time a voter picks a candidate on screen, the printer types up the selections, in small, eight-point letters. Before the voter pushes “vote,” she’s supposed to peer down at the ribbon of paper — which sits beneath a layer of see-through plastic, to prevent tampering — and verify that the machine has, in fact, correctly recorded her choices. (She can’t take the paper vote with her as proof; the spool of paper remains locked inside the machine until the end of the day.)

Under Ohio law, the paper copy is the voter’s vote. The digital version is not. That’s because the voter can see the paper vote and verify that it’s correct, which she cannot do with the digital one. The digital records are, in essence, merely handy additional copies that allow the county to rapidly tally potentially a million votes in a single evening, whereas counting the paper ballots would take weeks. Theoretically speaking, the machine offers the best of all possible worlds. By using both paper and digital copies, the AccuVote promised Cuyahoga an election that would be speedy, reliable and relatively inexpensive.

Little of this held true. When the machines were first used in Cuyahoga Country during the May 2006 primaries, costs ballooned — and chaos reigned. The poll workers, many senior citizens who had spent decades setting up low-tech punch-card systems, were baffled by the new computerized system and the rather poorly written manuals from Diebold and the county. “It was insane,” one former poll worker told me. “A lot of people over the age of 60, trying to figure out these machines.” Since the votes were ferried to the head office on small, pocket-size memory cards, it was easy for them to be misplaced, and dozens went missing.

On Election Day, poll workers complained that 143 machines were broken; dozens of other machines had printer jams or mysteriously powered down. More than 200 voter-card encoders — which create the cards that let voters vote — went missing. When the machines weren’t malfunctioning, they produced errors at a stunning rate: one audit of the election discovered that in 72.5 percent of the audited machines, the paper trail did not match the digital tally on the memory cards.

This was hardly the first such incident involving touch-screen machines. So it came as little surprise that Diebold, a company once known primarily for making safes and A.T.M.’s, subsequently tried to sell off its voting-machine business and, failing to find a buyer, last August changed the name of the division to Premier Election Solutions (an analyst told American Banker that the voting machines were responsible for “5 percent of revenue and 100 percent of bad public relations”).

Nearly a year after the May 2006 electoral disaster, Ohio’s new secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, asked the entire four-person Cuyahoga elections board to resign, and Platten — then the interim director of the board — was tapped to clean up the mess. Platten had already instituted a blizzard of tiny fixes. She added responsibilities to the position of “Election Day technician” — filled by young, computer-savvy volunteers who could help the white-haired poll workers reboot touch-screens when they crashed. She bought plastic business-card binders to hold memory cards from a precinct, so none would be misplaced. “Robocalls” at home from a phone-calling service reminded volunteers to show up. Her staff rewrote the inscrutable Diebold manuals in plain English.

The results were immediate. Over the next several months, Cuyahoga’s elections ran with many fewer crashes and shorter lines of voters. Platten’s candor and hard work won her fans among even the most fanatical anti-touch-screen activists. “It’s a miracle,” I was told by Adele Eisner, a Cuyahoga County resident who has been a vocal critic of touch-screen machines. “Jane Platten actually understands that elections are for the people.” The previous board, Eisner went on to say, ridiculed critics who claimed the machines would be trouble and refused to meet with them; the new replacements, in contrast, sometimes seemed as skeptical about the voting machines as the activists, and Eisner was invited in to wander about on election night, videotaping the activity.

Still, the events of Election Day 2007 showed just how ingrained the problems with the touch-screens were. The printed paper trails caused serious headaches all day long: at one polling place, printers on most of the machines weren’t functioning the night before the polls opened. Fortunately, one of the Election Day technicians was James Diener, a gray-haired former computer-and-mechanical engineer who opened up the printers, discovered that metal parts were bent out of shape and managed to repair them. The problem, he declared cheerfully, was that the printers were simply “cheap quality” (a complaint I heard from many election critics). “I’m an old computer nerd,” Diener said. “I can do anything with computers. Nothing’s wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election.”

He also pointed out several other problems with the machines, including the fact that the majority of voters he observed did not check the paper trail to see whether their votes were recorded correctly — even though that paper record is their legal ballot. (I noticed this myself, and many other poll workers told me the same thing.) Possibly they’re simply lazy, or the poll workers forget to tell them to; or perhaps they’re older and couldn’t see the printer’s tiny type anyway. And even if voters do check the paper trail, Diener pointed out, how do they know the machine is recording it for sure? “The whole printing thing is a farce,” he said.

What’s more, the poll workers regularly made security errors. When a touch-screen machine is turned on for the first time on Election Day, two observers from different parties are supposed to print and view the “zero tape” that shows there are no votes already recorded on the machine; a hacker could fix the vote by programming the machine to start, for example, with a negative total of votes for a candidate. Yet when I visited one Cleveland polling station at daybreak, the two checkers signed zero tapes without actually checking the zero totals. And then, of course, there were the server crashes, and the recording errors on 20 percent of the paper recount ballots.

Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Diebold, said that machine flaws were not necessarily to blame for the problems. The paper rolls were probably installed incorrectly by the poll workers. And in any case, he added, the paper trail was originally designed merely to help in auditing the accuracy of an election — it wasn’t supposed to be robust enough to serve as a legal ballot, as Ohio chose to designate it. But the servers were indeed an issue of the machine’s design; when his firm tested them weeks later, it found a data bottleneck that would need to be fixed with a software update.

The Nov. 6 vote in Cuyahoga County offered a sobering lesson. Having watched Platten’s staff and the elections board in action, I could see they were a model of professionalism. Yet they still couldn’t get their high-tech system to work as intended. For all their diligence and hard work, they were forced, in the end, to discard much of their paper and simply trust that the machines had recorded the votes accurately in digital memory.

THE QUESTION, OF COURSE, is whether the machines should be trusted to record votes accurately. Ed Felten doesn’t think so. Felten is a computer scientist at Princeton University, and he has become famous for analyzing — and criticizing — touch-screen machines. In fact, the first serious critics of the machines — beginning 10 years ago — were computer scientists. One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.

This is because computer scientists understand, from hard experience, that complex software can’t function perfectly all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. Myriad things can go wrong. The software might have bugs — errors in the code made by tired or overworked programmers. Or voters could do something the machines don’t expect, like touching the screen in two places at once. “Computers crash and we don’t know why,” Felten told me. “That’s just a routine part of computers.”

One famous example is the “sliding finger bug” on the Diebold AccuVote-TSX, the machine used in Cuyahoga. In 2005, the state of California complained that the machines were crashing. In tests, Diebold determined that when voters tapped the final “cast vote” button, the machine would crash every few hundred ballots. They finally intuited the problem: their voting software runs on top of Windows CE, and if a voter accidentally dragged his finger downward while touching “cast vote” on the screen, Windows CE interpreted this as a “drag and drop” command. The programmers hadn’t anticipated that Windows CE would do this, so they hadn’t programmed a way for the machine to cope with it. The machine just crashed.

Even extremely careful programmers can accidentally create bugs like this. But critics also worry that touch-screen voting machines aren’t designed very carefully at all. In the infrequent situations where computer scientists have gained access to the guts of a voting machine, they’ve found alarming design flaws. In 2003, Diebold employees accidentally posted the AccuVote’s source code on the Internet; scientists who analyzed it found that, among other things, a hacker could program a voter card to let him cast as many votes as he liked. Ed Felten’s lab, while analyzing an anonymously donated AccuVote-TS (a different model from the one used in Cuyahoga County) in 2006, discovered that the machine did not “authenticate” software: it will run any code a hacker might surreptitiously install on an easily insertable flash-memory card. After California’s secretary of state hired computer scientists to review the state’s machines last spring, they found that on one vote-tallying server, the default password was set to the name of the vendor — something laughably easy for a hacker to guess.

But the truth is that it’s hard for computer scientists to figure out just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like most software firms, they regard their “source code” — the computer programs that run on their machines — as a trade secret. The public is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess it for flaws and reliability can’t get access to it. Felten and voter rights groups argue that this “black box” culture of secrecy is the biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted.

The touch-screen vendors disagree. They point out that a small number of approved elections officials in each state and county are allowed to hold a copy in escrow and to examine it (though they are required to sign nondisclosure agreements preventing them from discussing the software publicly). Further, vendors argue, the machines are almost always tested by the government before they’re permitted to be used. The Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency, this year began to fully certify four private-sector labs to stress-test machines. They subject them to environmental pressures like heat and vibration to ensure they won’t break down on Election Day; and they run mock elections, to verify that the machines can count correctly. In almost all cases, if a vendor updates the software or hardware, it must be tested all over again, which can take months. “It’s an extremely rigorous process,” says Ken Fields, a spokesman for the voting-machine company ES&S.

If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines, the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs were also not required to test any machine’s underlying operating system, like Windows, for weaknesses.

Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered proprietary, so the public couldn’t find out how they were conducted. The nation’s largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed.

“The types of malfunctions we’re seeing would be caught in a first-year computer science course,” says Lillie Coney, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy Information Commission, which is releasing a study later this month critical of the federal tests.

In any case, the federal testing is not, strictly speaking, mandatory. The vast majority of states “certify” their machines as roadworthy. But since testing is extremely expensive, many states, particularly smaller ones, simply accept whatever passes through a federal lab. And while it’s true that state and local elections officials can generally keep a copy of the source code, critics say they rarely employ computer programmers sophisticated enough to understand it. Quite the contrary: When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, “the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all.” Many elections directors I spoke with have been in the job for years or even decades, working mostly with paper elections or lever machines. Few seemed very computer-literate.

The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.

This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors — accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.

In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor. Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many cases, they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and repair broken machines, for years on end.

“This is a crazy world,” complained Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor of Leon County in Florida. “The process is so under control by the vendor. The primary source of information comes only from the vendor, and the vendor has a conflict of interest in telling you the truth. The vendor isn’t going to tell me that his buggy software is why I can’t get the right time on my audit logs.”

As more and more evidence of machine failure emerges, senior government officials are sounding alarms as did the computer geeks of years ago over the growing role of private companies in elections. When I talked to Jennifer Brunner in October, she told me she wished all of Ohio’s machines were “open source” — that is, run on computer code that is published publicly, for anyone to see. Only then, she says, would voters trust it; and the scrutiny of thousands of computer scientists worldwide would ferret out any flaws and bugs.

On Nov. 6, the night of the Cuyahoga crashes, Jeff Hastings — the Republican head of the election board — sat and watched the Diebold technicians try to get the machines running. “Criminy,” he said. “You’ve got four different vendors. Why should their source codes be private? You’ve privatized the essential building block of the election system.”

The federal government appears to have taken that criticism to heart. New standards for testing voting machines now being implemented by the E.A.C. are regarded as more rigorous; some results are now being published online.

Amazingly, the Diebold spokesman, Chris Riggall, admitted to me that the company is considering making the software open source on its next generation of touch-screen machines, so that anyone could download, inspect or repair the code. The pressure from states is growing, he added, and “if the expectations of our customers change, we’ll have to respond to that reality.”

IF YOU WANT TO GET a sense of the real stakes in voting-machine politics, Christine Jennings has a map to show you. It is a sprawling, wall-size diagram of the voting precincts that make up Florida’s 13th district, and it hangs on the wall of her campaign office in Sarasota, where she ran for the Congressional seat in November 2006. Jennings, a Democrat, lost the seat by 369 votes to the Republican, Vern Buchanan, in a fierce fight to replace Katherine Harris. But Jennings quickly learned of an anomaly in the voting: some 18,000 people had “undervoted.” That is, they had voted in every other race — a few dozen were on the ballot, including a gubernatorial contest — but abstained in the Jennings-Buchanan fight. A normal undervote in any given race is less than 3 percent. In this case, a whopping 13 percent of voters somehow decided to not vote.

“See, look at this,” Jennings said, dragging me over to the map when I visited her in November. Her staff had written the size of the undervote in every precinct in Sarasota, where the undervotes occurred: 180 votes in one precinct, 338 in another. “I mean, it’s huge!” she said. “It’s just unbelievable.” She pointed to Precinct 150, a district on the south end of Sarasota County. Buchanan received 346 votes, Jennings received 275 and the undervote was 133. “I mean, people would walk in and vote for everything except this race?” she said. “Why?”

Jennings says he believes the reason is simple: Sarasota’s touch-screen machines malfunctioned — and lost votes that could have tipped the election in her favor. Her staff has received hundreds of complaints from voters reporting mysterious behavior on the part of the machines. The specific model that Sarasota used was the iVotronic, by the company ES&S. According to the complaints, when voters tried to touch the screen for Jennings, the iVotronic wouldn’t accept it, or would highlight Buchanan’s name instead. When they got to the final pages of the ballot, where they reviewed their picks, the complainants said, the Jennings-Buchanan race was missing — even though they were sure they’d voted in it. The reports streamed in not merely from technophobic senior citizens but also from tech-savvy younger people, including a woman with a Ph.D. in computer science and a saleswoman who actually works for a firm that sells touch-screen devices. (Even Vern Buchanan’s wife reported having trouble voting for her husband.)

If the election had been in Cuyahoga, the paper trail might have settled the story. But the iVotronic, unlike Cuyahoga’s machines, does not provide a paper backup. It records votes only in digital memory: on a removable flash-memory card and on an additional flash-memory chip embedded inside the machine. Since the Jennings-Buchanan election was so close, state law called for an automatic recount. But on a paperless machine like the iVotronic, a recount is purely digital — it consists of nothing but removing the flash memory inside the machine and hitting “print” again. Jennings did, indeed, lose the recount; when they reprinted, elections workers found that the internal chips closely matched the original count (Jennings picked up four more votes). But for Jennings this is meaningless, because she says it was the screens that malfunctioned.

As evidence, she brandishes pieces of evidence she says are smoking guns. One is a memo from ES&S executives, issued in August 2006, warning that they had found a bug in the iVotronic software that produced a delay in the screen; after a voter made her choice, it would take a few seconds for the screen to display it. This, Jennings noted, could cause problems, because a voter, believing that the machine had not recorded her first touch, might push the screen again — accidentally deselecting her initial vote. Jennings also suspects that the iVotronic’s hardware may have malfunctioned. An August HDNet investigation by Dan Rather discovered that the company manufacturing the touchscreens for the iVotronic had a history of production flaws. The flaw affected the calibration of the screen: When exposed to humidity — much like the weather in Florida — the screen would gradually lose accuracy.

Elections officials in Sarasota and ES&S hotly disagree that the machines were in error, noting that the calibration problems with the screens were fixed before the election. Kathy Dent, Sarasota’s elections supervisor, suspects that the undervote was real — which is to say, voters intentionally skipped the race, to punish Jennings and Buchanan for waging a particularly vitriolic race. “People were really fed up,” she told me. Other observers say voters were simply confused by the ballot design and didn’t see the Jennings-Buchanan race.

To try to settle the question, a government audit tried to test whether the machines had malfunctioned. The state acquired a copy of the iVotronic source code from ES&S and commissioned a group of computer scientists to inspect it. Their report said they could find no flaws in the code that would lead to such a large undervote. Meanwhile, the state conducted a mock election, getting elections workers to repeatedly click the screens on iVotronic machines, voting Jennings or Buchanan. Again, no accidental undervote appeared. Early results from a separate test by an M.I.T. professor found that when voters were presented with the Sarasota ballot, over 16 percent accidentally skipped over the Jennings-Buchanan race — suggesting that poor ballot design and voter error was, indeed, part of the problem.

These explanations have not satisfied Jennings and her supporters. Kendall Coffey, one of Jennings’s lawyers, has a different theory: the votes were mostly lost because of a “nonrecurring software bug” — a quirk that, like the sliding-finger bug, only crops up some of the time, propelled by voter actions that the audits did not replicate, like a voter’s accidentally touching the screen in two places at once. For her part, Jennings brushes off the idea that voters were punishing her and Buchanan. Plenty of Congressional fights are nasty, she says, but they almost never yield 13 percent undervotes.

And on and on it goes. ES&S and Sarasota correctly point out that Jennings has no proof that a bug exists. Jennings correctly points out that her opponents have no proof a bug doesn’t exist. This is the ultimate political legacy of touch-screen voting machines and the privatization of voting machinery generally. When invisible, secretive software runs an election, it allows for endless mistrust and muttered accusations of conspiracy. The inscrutability of the software — combined with touch-screen machines’ well-documented history of weird behavior — allows critics to level almost any accusation against the machines and have it sound plausible. “It’s just like the Kennedy assassination,” Shamos, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, laments. “There’s no matter of evidence that will stop people from spinning yarns.”

Part of the problem stems from the fact that voting requires a level of precision we demand from virtually no other technology. We demand that the systems behind A.T.M.’s and credit cards be accurate, of course. But if they’re not, we can quickly detect something is wrong: we notice that our balance is off and call the bank, or the bank notices someone in China bought $10,000 worth of clothes and calls us to make sure it’s legitimate. But in an election, the voter must remain anonymous to the government. If a machine crashes and the county worries it has lost some ballots, it cannot go back and ask voters how they voted — because it doesn’t know who they are. It is the need for anonymity that fuels the quest for perfection in voting machines.

Perfection isn’t possible, of course; every voting system has flaws. So historically, the public — and candidates for public office — have grudgingly accepted that their voting systems will produce some errors here and there. The deep, ongoing consternation over touch-screen machines stems from something new: the unpredictability of computers. Computers do not merely produce errors; they produce errors of unforeseeable magnitude. Will people trust a system when they never know how big or small its next failure will be?

ON THE FRIDAY BEFORE the November elections in Pennsylvania, I wandered into a church in a suburb of Pittsburgh. The church was going to serve as a poll location, and I was wondering: Had the voting machines been dropped off? Were they lying around unguarded — and could anyone gain access to them?

When I approached the side door of the church at 6 p.m., two women were unloading food into the basement kitchen. (They were visitors from another church who had a key to get in, but they told me they’d found the door unlocked.) I held the door for them, chatted politely, then strolled into the otherwise completely empty building. Neither woman asked why I was there.

I looked over in the corner and there they were: six iVotronic voting machines, stacked up neatly. While the women busied themselves in their car, I was left completely alone with the machines. The iVotronics had been sealed shut with numbered tamper seals to prevent anyone from opening a machine illicitly, but cutting and resealing them looked pretty easy. In essence, I could have tampered with the machines in any way I wanted, with very little chance of being detected or caught.

Is it possible that someone could hack voting machines and rig an election? Elections officials insist that they are extremely careful to train poll workers to recognize signs of machines that had been tampered with. They also claim, frequently, that the machines are carefully watched. Neither is entirely true. Machines often sit for days before elections in churches, and while churches may be wonderfully convenient polling locations, they’re about as insecure a location as you could imagine: strangers are supposed to wander into churches. And while most poll workers do carefully check to ensure that the tamper seals on the machines are unbroken, I heard reports from poll workers who saw much more lax behavior in their colleagues.

Yet here’s the curious thing: Almost no credible scientific critics of touch-screen voting say they believe any machines have ever been successfully hacked. Last year, Ed Felten, the computer scientist from Princeton, wrote a report exhaustively documenting the many ways a Diebold AccuVote-TSX could be hacked — including a technique for introducing a vote-rigging virus that would spread from machine to machine in a precinct. But Felten says the chance this has really happened is remote. He argues that the more likely danger of touch-screen machines is not in malice but in errors. Michael Shamos agrees. “If there are guys who are trying to tamper with elections through manipulation of software, we would have seen evidence of it,” he told me. “Nobody ever commits the perfect crime the first time. We would have seen a succession of failed attempts leading up to possibly a successful attempt. We’ve never seen it.”

This is a great oddity in the debate over electronic voting. When state officials in California and Ohio explain why they’re moving away from touch-screen voting, they inevitably cite hacking as a chief concern. And the original, left-wing opposition to the machines in the 2004 election focused obsessively on Diebold’s C.E.O. proclaiming that he would help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes” for Bush. Those fears still dominate the headlines, but in the real world of those who conduct and observe voting machines, the realistic threat isn’t conspiracy. It’s unreliability, incompetence and sheer error.

IF YOU WANTED to know where the next great eruption of voting-machine scandal is likely to emerge, you’d have to drive deep into the middle of Pennsylvania. Tucked amid rolling, forested hills is tiny Bellefonte. It is where the elections board of Centre County has its office, and in the week preceding the November election, the elections director, Joyce McKinley, conducted a public demonstration of the county’s touch-screen voting machines. She would allow anyone from the public to test six machines to ensure they worked as intended.

“Remember, we’re here to observe the machines, not debate them,” she said dryly. The small group that had turned out included a handful of anti-touch-screen activists, including Mary Vollero, an art teacher who wore pins saying “No War in Iraq” and “Books Not Bombs.” As we gathered around, I could understand why the county board had approved the purchase of the machines two years ago. For a town with a substantial elderly population, the electronic screens were large, crisp and far easier to read than small-print paper ballots. “The voters around here love ’em,” McKinley shrugged.

But what’s notable about Centre County is that it uses the iVotronic — the very same star-crossed machine from Sarasota. Given the concerns about the lack of a paper trail on the iVotronics, why didn’t Centre County instead buy a machine that produces a paper record? Because Pennsylvania state law will not permit any machine that would theoretically make it possible to figure out how someone voted. And if a Diebold AccuVote-TSX, for instance, were used in a precinct where only, say, a dozen people voted — a not-uncommon occurrence in small towns — then an election worker could conceivably watch who votes, in what order, and unspool the tape to figure out how they voted. (And there are no alternatives; all touch-screen machines with paper trails use spools.) As a result, nearly 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s counties bought iVotronics.

Though it has gone Democratic in the last few presidential elections, Pennsylvania is considered a swing state. As the political consultant James Carville joked, it’s a mix of red and blue: you’ve got Pittsburgh and Philadelphia at either end and Alabama in the middle.

It also has 21 electoral-college votes, a relatively large number that could decide a tight presidential race. Among election-machine observers, this provokes a shudder of anticipation. If the presidential vote is close, it could well come down to a recount in Pennsylvania. And a recount could uncover thousands of votes recorded on machines that displayed aberrant behavior — with no paper trail. Would the public accept it? Would the candidates? As Candice Hoke, the head of Ohio’s Center for Election Integrity, puts it: “If it was Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, everyone is saying it’s going to be Pennsylvania in 2008.”

The prospect of being thrust into the national spotlight has already prompted many counties to spar over ditching their iVotronics. The machines were an election issue in Centre County in November, with several candidates for county commissioner running on a pledge to get rid of the devices. (Two won and are trying to figure out if they can afford it.) And the opposition to touch-screens isn’t just coming from Democrats. When the Pennsylvania Republican Rick Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006, some Santorum voters complained that the iVotronics “flipped” their votes before their eyes. In Pittsburgh, the chief opponent of the machines is David Fawcett, the lone Republican on the county board of elections. “It’s not a partisan issue,” he says. “And even if it was, Republicans, at least in this state, would have a much greater interest in accuracy. The capacity for error is big, and the error itself could be so much greater than it could be on prior systems.”

GIVEN THAT THERE IS NO perfect voting system, is there at least an optimal one? Critics of touch-screen machines say that the best choice is “optical scan” technology. With this system, the voter pencils in her vote on a paper ballot, filling in bubbles to indicate which candidates she prefers. The vote is immediately tangible to the voters; they see it with their own eyes, because they personally record it. The tallying is done rapidly, because the ballots are fed into a computerized scanner. And if there’s a recount, the elections officials can simply take out the paper ballots and do it by hand.

Optical scanning is used in what many elections experts regard as the “perfect elections” of Leon County in Florida, where Ion Sancho is the supervisor of elections. In the late ’80s, when the county was replacing its lever machines, Sancho investigated touch-screens. But he didn’t think they were user-friendly, didn’t believe they would provide a reliable recount and didn’t want to be beholden to a private-sector vendor. So he bought the optical-scanning devices from Unisys and trained his staff to be able to repair problems when the machines broke or malfunctioned. His error rate — how often his system miscounts a ballot — is three-quarters of a percent at its highest, and has dipped as low as three-thousandths of a percent.

More important, his paper trail prevents endless fighting over the results of tight elections. In one recent contest, a candidate claimed that his name had not appeared on the ballot in one precinct. So Sancho went into the Leon County storage, broke the security seals on the records, and pulled out the ballots. The name was there; the candidate was wrong. “He apologized to me,” Sancho recalls. “And that’s what you can’t do with touch-screen technology. You never could have proven to that person’s satisfaction that the screen didn’t show his name. I like that certainty. The paper ends the discussion.” Sancho has never had a legal fight over a disputed election result. “The losers have admitted they lost, which is what you want,” he adds. “You have to be able to convince the loser they lost.”

That, in a nutshell, is what people crave in the highly partisan arena of modern American politics: an election that can be extremely close and yet regarded by all as fair. Not only must the losing candidate believe in the loss; the public has to believe in it, too.

This is why Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, stung by the debacle in Sarasota, persuaded the state to abandon its iVotronic machines before the 2008 presidential elections and adopt optical scanning; and why, in Ohio, Cuyahoga County is planning to spend up to $12 million to switch to optical scanning in the next year (after the county paid $21 million for its touch-screens just a few years ago).

Still, optical scanning is hardly a flawless system. If someone doesn’t mark a ballot clearly, a recount can wind up back in the morass of arguing over “voter intent.” The machines also need to be carefully calibrated so they don’t miscount ballots. Blind people may need an extra device installed to help them vote. Poorly trained poll workers could simply lose ballots. And the machines do, in fact, run software that can be hacked: Sancho himself has used computer scientists to hack his machines. It’s also possible that any complex software isn’t well suited for running elections. Most software firms deal with the inevitable bugs in their product by patching them; Microsoft still patches its seven-year-old Windows XP several times a month. But vendors of electronic voting machines do not have this luxury, because any update must be federally tested for months.

There are also serious logistical problems for the states that are switching to optical scan machines this election cycle. Experts estimate that it takes at least two years to retrain poll workers and employees on a new system; Cuyahoga County is planning to do it only three months. Even the local activists who fought to bring in optical scanning say this shift is recklessly fast — and likely to cause problems worse than the touch-screen machines would. Indeed, this whipsawing from one voting system to the next is another danger in our modern electoral wars. Public crises of confidence in voting machines used to come along rarely, every few decades. But now every single election cycle seems to provoke a crisis, a thirst for a new technological fix. The troubles of voting machines may subside as optical scanning comes in, but they’re unlikely to ever go away.
 

Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about technology.

    Can You Count On These Machines?, NYT, 6.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?hp

Embracing His Moment, Obama Preaches Hope in New Hampshire

January 5, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL

CONCORD, N.H. — Senator Barack Obama hops up to the stage in that hip-mod gray suit of his, clapping along with the audience on Friday, clapping for himself, clapping for this moment. He gazes at 1,200 people in overcoats and woolen hats and snow boots and asks for a show of hands.

Be honest. How many of you are undecided about who you will support? A sea of arms shoots up.

This is for a presidential candidate a golden sight. He is talking to those who yearn to be converted. He turns to two young aides and offers a stage whisper: “See that? We got a lot of live ones.”

Then he takes off at a rhetorical gallop, pulling the crowd behind him, lifting it, then slowing down. He is recruiting followers, yes, and his Democratic primary race here with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton could not be tighter. But the moment is suffused, so as almost not to require that he make it explicit, with a sense of historical moment. I, you, we can make history, he says, by turning the nation’s sorrowful racial narrative into something radiant and hopeful.

Partisan divisions, racial divisions, blur in his telling.

He rarely hits the bass pedal on race. He talks of Selma and Montgomery and of the Revolutionary War and the Battle of the Bulge. But as he tells his own primal tale, heads nod in the audience.

“I was raised by a single mom. We had neither wealth nor privilege,” he says. “All odds — all odds — said I shouldn’t be standing here. But I am because of love and education and lots of hope. That’s what we can stand for in four days. That’s what you can stand for.”

There is no getting around it, this man who emerged triumphant from the Iowa caucuses is something unusual in American politics. He has that close-cropped hair and the high-school-smooth face with that deep saxophone of a voice. His borrowings, rhetorical and intellectual, are dizzying. One minute he recalls the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his pacing and aching, staccato repetitions. The next minute he is updating John F. Kennedy with his “ask not what America can do for you” riff on idealism and hope.

Mr. Obama is not always on; particularly early in speeches he can become tangled in his words. But he rarely rushes; he takes it for granted that his audience will come along for the ride. So: “Hope is not blind optimism.” Pause. “Hope is not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight.” Pause. “Hope is that thing inside of us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that there is something greater inside of us.”

Such words mine a vein of American history that leaves more than a few listeners misty-eyed. “He’s not running as a black man, but he understands the pain of that past,” said Frank Clarkson, a Unitarian Universalist pastor who lives near Portsmouth and drove out with his wife, Tracey, to hear Mr. Obama. “He makes me feel like it’s one of those moments in American history where I need to take a chance.”

Mrs. Clinton holds a small lead in recent polls in New Hampshire, and she is an experienced candidate intent on making her own gender history. She has started to score Mr. Obama as a neophyte at the business of politics. We do not campaign on parallel tracks, she said Friday, implying that her party should not forget that the Republicans are going to come hard at the Democratic nominee and that Mr. Obama would be a soft target compared with her.

Mr. Obama larded his speech here at Concord High School with references to global warming and to his speech in Detroit urging mandatory gas mileage requirements. And he spoke about his pledge to withdraw American troops from Iraq and how he would fight the drug companies to get something close to universal health care.

He is, however, hardly a naif at political parry and thrust. The Clinton campaign recently rapped him as too ambitious, even suggesting that it had proof that he had lusted in elementary school for the White House. So Friday Mr. Obama walked off his campaign airplane and into a cavernous old Pan Am hangar near Portsmouth. He looked around, nodded, and offered a sly smile.

“This feels good,” he said with emphasis. “It’s just like I imagined it when I was talking to my kindergarten teacher.”

There is a pregnant pause and laughter ripples through the audience.

He mentions at each stop on Friday that he desires the votes of disaffected Republicans. But he also hits at their standard-bearers, particularly New York’s former mayor who formerly led in Republican presidential polls, Rudolph W. Giuliani. “We need a president who stops using 9/11 as a way to scare up votes and uses it as a way to bring out the best in us,” Mr. Obama says.

But most of all he seems almost haunted by the potentially fleeting nature of his moment. Vote for me now, he urges, because who knows, tomorrow or the day after this could all slip away. He pokes at those who say he is precocious.

“They say I need to be seasoned; they say I need to be stewed,” he says. “They say, ‘We need to boil all the hope out of him — like us — and then he’ll be ready.’”

To this, he counterposes, again and again, the words of Dr. King, who spoke of “the fierce urgency of now.”

In Portsmouth, in a hangar so chilled that breath turned to steam, he began slowly, tired, his eyes slits. But 20 minutes later, he leaned into the microphone and held his hand aloft and punched at the air.

“If you will work with me, like you’ve never worked before, then we will win,” he says. And he draws a breath. “And we will win America.” Another breath. “And then we will change the world.”

    Embracing His Moment, Obama Preaches Hope in New Hampshire, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/us/politics/05obama.html

Daring to Believe, Blacks Savor Obama Victory

January 5, 2008
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL

For Sadou Brown in a Los Angeles suburb, the decisive victory of Senator Barack Obama in Iowa was a moment to show his 14-year-old son what is possible.

For Mike Duncan in Maryland, it was a sign that Americans were moving beyond rigid thinking about race.

For Milton Washington in Harlem, it looked like the beginning of something he never thought that he would see. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re on the cusp of something big about to happen,’ ” Mr. Washington said.

How Mr. Obama’s early triumph will play out in the presidential contest remains to be seen, and his support among blacks is hardly monolithic.

But in dozens of interviews on Friday from suburbs of Houston to towns outside Chicago and rural byways near Birmingham, Ala., African-Americans voiced pride and amazement over his victory on Thursday and the message it sent, even if they were not planning to vote for him or were skeptical that he could win in November.

“My goodness, has it ever happened before, a black man, in our life, in our country?” asked Edith Lambert, 60, a graduate student in theology who was having lunch at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston.

“It makes me feel proud that at a time when so many things are going wrong in the world that people can rise above past errors,” added Ms. Lambert, who said she had not decided whom to vote for. “It shows that people aren’t thinking small. They’re thinking large, outside the box.”

Other black presidential candidates, like Shirley A. Chisholm and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have excited voters in the past. Mr. Jackson won primaries in 1984 and 1988.

Over and over, blacks said Mr. Obama’s achievement in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state, made him seem a viable crossover candidate, a fresh face with the first real shot at capturing a major party nomination.

“People across America, even in Iowa of all places, can look across the color line and see the person,” said Mr. Brown, 35, who was working at the reception desk at DK’s Hair Design near Ladera Heights, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb.

Describing himself as a “huge, huge supporter,” of Mr. Obama, Mr. Brown added: “So many times, our young people only have sports stars or musicians to look up to. But now, when we tell them to go to school, to aim high in life, they have a face to put with the ambition.”

Mildred Kerr, 68, a Republican who took her granddaughter to the salon for a trim and added that she did not plan to vote for Mr. Obama, said she was nonetheless happy that he had won, because he “can now have the encouragement to go on and pursue a victory.”

George F. Knox, 64, a lawyer and civic leader in Miami who supports Mr. Obama’s candidacy, made a similar point.

“The notion is mind-boggling,” Mr. Knox said. “When a virtual mandate to continue comes out of a place like Iowa, with only a 2 percent black population, it’s very important.”

Several blacks said Mr. Obama’s victory with a campaign not based on race could herald the emergence of a new political calculus.

“I think he’s already made a significant change in the mindset of people,” said Mike Duncan, 55, an Amtrak manager in Abingdon, Md. “Across the board, I’m glad to see that whites and blacks are beginning to understand that blacks can represent them and also be successful at it.”

Shannon Brown, 17, a high school senior on the South Side of Chicago, said she was thrilled that she would be eligible to vote by Election Day.

“I’ve actually seen him around the neighborhood and had conversations with him,” Ms. Brown said, calling Mr. Obama’s candidacy “history in the making” and “a wonderful experience for us as a people.”

She added, “It’s something I will be able to tell my kids when I grow up, that I voted for the first black president.”

Several supporters of Mr. Obama said they liked him for reasons other than race, including what they saw as his interest in stemming injustice and his projection of sincerity.

“I identify just because everything they ask, he is straightforward,” said Charlette Fleming, 26, an insurance agent who was buying lunch at a mall in The Woodlands, a suburb 30 miles north of Houston. “They put him on the spot because he did marijuana. I’ve never done drugs before. But he was: ‘O.K., I did it. I’m not going to deny that I did it.’ He’s not trying to hide anything he’s done. He’s out in the open.”

Some voters said Mr. Obama’s heritage as the son of a white mother and an African father meant that he was not exactly black, but added that it allowed him to appeal to more people.

“He’s demonstrated that a mixed-race guy with a Muslim name can get far,” said Tony Clayton, 43, as he had his shoes shined at the Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington. Mr. Clayton was referring to Mr. Obama’s middle name, Hussein.

“He has crossover appeal,” Mr. Clayton said, “and because of that he could win in a general election.”

Others looked to the emotional force that an Obama presidency could wield for African-Americans and dismissed the notion raised by some analysts that his background would make it difficult for American blacks to identify with him.

“The psychological advantage of waking up knowing and seeing almost every day the leader of the free world as a member of your own tribe brings pride even to the most cynical critic,” said Michael Eric Dyson, 49, a professor at Georgetown University and an Obama supporter who has studied racial identity. “Maybe this psychic, internal emotional turmoil that black people struggle against will somehow be lessened by seeing the image of a black man in charge.”

Even amid the joy over the dawning sense that Mr. Obama could indeed become president there were hesitancy and doubt.

“Right now, it’s too good to be true, and I think most of us don’t want to get our hopes up too high,” said Eboni Anthony, 28, manager of Carol’s Daughter, which sells scented candles, soaps and moisturizers across the street from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. “I think racism is as alive as it was 30 years ago.

“I would love to believe in a fairy tale of having a black president. But I don’t believe the whole United States would agree to it.”

In Harlem, Mr. Washington, a 37-year-old manager of business development for a medical health research company, expressed similar skepticism.

“Listen, I’ve lived in the sticks, so I know how this country is,” said Mr. Washington, who is half Korean and has lived in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. “In the beginning, it was like, ‘I’d love a black dude, especially a black dude like that in the office.’ But I didn’t think it was possible.”

At the Bessemer Flea Market near Birmingham, Jasper V. Hall, 69, said: “I was hoping he didn’t win. I didn’t want him to get shot.”

Mr. Hall, an electrical worker who said he had changed his party affiliation from Republican to support Mr. Obama, added, “Hopefully he can win and stay alive.”

He said he felt Mr. Obama was the candidate who best represented him and understood his struggles.

“You know that ceiling,” Mr. Hall said. “You’re not going to see it flashing back at you, but you know it’s up there. No matter how good, how smart, how much money you have. You’re going to see that ceiling that’s going to reflect and stop you.

“It’s the same ceiling that gets poor people, Hispanic people. It’s the same ceiling. I’m ready for someone to break that ceiling.”

Reporting was contributed by James Barron, Timothy Williams and John Eligon from New York; Lakiesha R. Carr and Holli Chmela from Washington; Rebecca Cathcart from Los Angeles; Brenda Goodman from Birmingham, Ala.; Rachel Mosteller from Houston; Susan Saulny from Chicago; Kirk Semple from Miami; and Katie Zezima from Boston.

    Daring to Believe, Blacks Savor Obama Victory, NYT, 5.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/us/politics/05race.html?hp

Obama, Clinton Face Crucial Test

January 4, 2008
Filed at 6:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- welcome to New Hampshire, where you each face the biggest test of your political lives.

Obama, whose victory in Iowa on Thursday transformed him into a political giant slayer, faces five days of heightened scrutiny before the state's Jan. 8 primary amid the klieg lights of sudden superstardom.

Clinton, who just weeks ago was the undisputed Democratic front-runner, must use those same five days to rebound from a crippling loss in Iowa in order to prevent her candidacy from imploding.

''New Hampshire is the last chance for someone who loses Iowa,'' said Andrew Smith, polling director for the University of New Hampshire. ''You lose in Iowa and you lose New Hampshire, it's done. You go home.''

Analysts of all stripes expect a sharp change in tone in New Hampshire after the candidates spent a year playing ''Iowa Nice.''

Obama's message of hope and unity was also a fine fit for Iowa, a state where voters are notoriously resistant to negative campaigning. The Democratic contest there was a relatively civil affair, where not a single televised attack ad was aired and where the contenders exchanged only mild jabs.

Such pleasantries will surely be jettisoned in New Hampshire by Clinton and John Edwards, who placed slightly ahead of Clinton in Iowa and who has shown his willingness to take a scalpel to his opponents when necessary. Edwards staked much of his candidacy on Iowa but aides say he has the resources in New Hampshire to fight on.

All of that means Obama goes into this state's compressed contest with a target on his back -- a situation he has managed to avoid throughout his career in politics.

''Obama, through an unprecedented convergence of luck and skill, has never before faced serious attack delivered by a competent opponent,'' Democratic strategist Dan Newman said. ''He's now earned the right to be mercilessly scrubbed and scrutinized. No one knows how he'll respond to the challenge, and how voters will evaluate the criticism.''

Clinton, whose once sturdy lead in New Hampshire had already begun to close in the days before Iowa's caucuses, is relying on the state as her husband did in 1992 to make her the ''comeback kid.'' The former president is still widely popular here and will campaign for his wife until next Tuesday's primary.

Hillary Clinton's aides say her campaign will renew its scrutiny of Obama's comparatively thin record and lack of foreign policy experience, questioning whether he is ready to lead in a dangerous world.

They will also try to paint him as something of a phony -- someone whose lofty rhetoric isn't born out in his own public record. They point to his votes in the Senate to fund the Iraq war even as he tried to position himself as the strongest anti-war candidate in the field.

''He talks about change but has no real record of making change,'' said Mark Penn, the Clinton campaign's pollster and senior strategist.

The Clinton campaign is also likely to begin airing commercials attacking Obama's health care plan, which they say would leave 15 million people uninsured.

Edwards, meanwhile, can be expected to renew questions about whether Obama's brand of unity politics is too naive for the dog-eat-dog world of partisan Washington.

Much will also be riding on a nationally televised debate among the Democratic contenders Saturday. Both Clinton and Edwards have typically excelled in such forums, while Obama's performances have been inconsistent.

''The debate will loom large,'' said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire. ''It's a chance for Clinton to score some needed points, so she will probably try to make Obama look bad and capitalize on something with regard to his lack of experience.''

------

Editor's Note: Beth Fouhy covers politics for The Associated Press.

    Obama, Clinton Face Crucial Test, NYT, 4.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Democrats-Analysis.html

A Look at Huckabee, Obama Iowa Victories

January 4, 2008
Filed at 11:04 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Religion played a huge role in Mike Huckabee's triumph in the Iowa Republican caucuses, though there are some mixed signals for him on the road ahead. On the Democratic side, it was fresh blood -- and an outcry for change -- that helped propel Barack Obama to his victory in the state.

Eight in 10 Huckabee supporters said they are born again or evangelical Christians, according to an entrance poll for The Associated Press and television networks. Another six in 10 said it was very important to share their candidate's religious beliefs. In both categories, none of the former Arkansas governor's opponents came close to that kind of support.

In addition, six in 10 Huckabee supporters -- more than his rivals -- said it was most important that their candidate shared their values. Only 4 percent of his backers said they wanted a contender with experience, and 2 percent said they were looking for a Republican who can win the White House in November.

On the Democratic side, more than a third of Obama's support was from voters under age 30, eclipsing Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards among the young, according to those entering the caucuses. In contrast, more than a third of Clinton's vote came from people age 65 and older, far more than her top rivals.

More than half of Edwards' supporters were veteran caucus goers, while most of Clinton's and Obama's backers were first-timers. And a desire for change was like a rocket booster for Obama -- half of Democrats said the ability to force change was the pivotal factor in picking a candidate, and half of them backed the youthful Illinois senator.

For both Iowa winners, though, the momentum they gained will be tested.

With New Hampshire's primaries next Tuesday, the campaign's next stop is a state where only about one in five GOP voters are born again or evangelical Christians -- about one-third the number who claimed that status among Iowa Republicans.

While 46 percent of Iowa's born again or evangelical GOP voters backed Huckabee, a slight majority did not -- indicating a willingness to support candidates other than the ordained Baptist minister who has made religion a centerpiece of his campaign. Mitt Romney, former governor of New Hampshire's neighbor, Massachusetts, got one in five of those voters in Iowa.

Huckabee dominated among Iowa conservatives overall, winning about a third of their vote, compared to about a quarter for Romney. Yet most of that support came from conservatives who are also born again or evangelical. Nearly half of them voted for Huckabee, compared to less than a fifth of other conservatives who supported him.

Huckabee trailed John McCain, and was even with Romney, among the one in 10 at the GOP caucuses who say they are independents. New Hampshire has far more independents than that. In its last competitive Republican contest, in 2000, 41 percent of voters called themselves independent, more than in any other GOP primary exit poll that year -- and they were a key to McCain's New Hampshire victory over George W. Bush.

As for Obama, he benefited from a strong turnout by young voters -- 22 percent of Iowa Democrats at the caucuses were less than age 30, compared to the 17 percent of that age who voted in Iowa's 2004 Democratic race.

Obama won a staggering 57 percent of those young people's votes. Young voters are typically harder to lure to the polls than older ones, and it's not certain he will be able to maintain that kind of commitment from them as the contest hopscotches around the country.

He won four in 10 votes of those attending Iowa's caucuses for the first time -- a group that comprised more than half of those who showed up Thursday.

Just more than half of Obama supporters were single, while more than six in 10 of Clinton's and Edwards' were married.

Obama's strength also enabled him to narrowly capture a banner that many national polls showed belonged to Clinton: women. He got 35 percent of their support, compared to 30 percent for the New York senator and 23 percent for Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina. In other words, only three in 10 women backed the candidate who if victorious would be the first female president.

There was a winner in Iowa Thursday who had majority support from women, but it was Huckabee. Fifty-two percent of his votes came from women, making him the only GOP candidate to get more than half his support from females.

Besides leading among women, Huckabee tied Romney among men. He also prevailed among young and middle-aged voters and those earning less than $100,000 annually, while breaking even with Romney among the oldest people.

About a third of Clinton's supporters cited experience as the key personal quality they were seeking, well ahead of her two major rivals. As for Edwards, one-third of his strength came from those looking for a candidate who empathizes with people -- far more than his opponents received.

The poll was conducted for the AP and the television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International as voters arrived at 40 sites each for Democratic and Republican caucuses in Iowa. The Democratic entrance poll interviewed 2,136 caucus-goers, the Republican survey 1,600. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points for each.

    A Look at Huckabee, Obama Iowa Victories, NYT, 4.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Caucus-Poll.html

Obama Takes Iowa in a Big Turnout as Clinton Falters; Huckabee Victor

January 4, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

DES MOINES — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a first-term Democratic senator trying to become the nation’s first African-American president, rolled to victory in the Iowa caucuses on Thursday night, lifted by a record turnout of voters who embraced his promise of change.

The victory by Mr. Obama, 46, amounted to a startling setback for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 60, of New York, who just months ago presented herself as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. The result left uncertain the prospects for John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, who had staked his second bid for the White House on winning Iowa.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards, who edged her out for second place by less than a percentage point, both vowed to stay in the race.

“They said this day would never come,” Mr. Obama said as he claimed his victory at a packed rally in downtown Des Moines.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who was barely a blip on the national scene just two months ago, defeated Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, delivering a serious setback to Mr. Romney’s high-spending campaign and putting pressure on Mr. Romney to win in New Hampshire next Tuesday.

Mr. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was carried in large part by evangelical voters, who helped him withstand extensive spending by Mr. Romney on television advertising and a get-out-the-vote effort.

“Tonight we proved that American politics is still in the hands of ordinary folks like you,” said Mr. Huckabee, who ran on a platform that combined economic populism with an appeal to social conservatives.

Mr. Huckabee won with 34.4 percent of the delegate support, after 86 percent of precincts had reported. Mr. Romney had 25.4 percent, former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee had 13.4 percent and Senator John McCain of Arizona had 13.2 percent.

On the Democratic side, with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Obama had 37.6 percent of the delegate support, Mr. Edwards 29.8 percent and Mrs. Clinton had 29.5 percent. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico was fourth, at 2.11 percent.

Two Democrats, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, dropped out of the race after winning only tiny percentages of the vote.

A record number of Democrats turned out to caucus — more than 239,000, compared with fewer than 125,0000 in 2004 — producing scenes of overcrowded firehouses and schools and long lines of people waiting to register their preferences.

The images stood as evidence of the success of Mr. Obama’s effort to reach out to thousands of first-time caucusgoers, including many independent voters and younger voters. The huge turn-out — by contrast, 108,000 Republicans caucused on Thursday — demonstrated the extent to which opposition to President Bush has energized Democrats, and served as another warning to Republicans about the problems they face this November in swing states like this.

Mr. Obama’s victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president. What was remarkable was the extent to which race was not a factor in this contest. Surveys of voters entering the caucuses also indicated that he had won the support of many independents, a development that his aides used to rebut suggestions from rivals that he could not win a general election. In addition, voters clearly rejected the argument that Mr. Obama does not have sufficient experience to take over the White House, a central point pressed by Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Obama took the stage, smiling broadly and clapping his hands in response to the roar of cheers that greeted him.

“They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,” Mr. Obama said. “But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.”

The result sent tremors of apprehension through Mrs. Clinton’s camp, and she promptly turned her attention to New Hampshire, flying there on a plane that left at midnight. Aides said that former President Bill Clinton would go there immediately and spend the next five days campaigning in a state where he has always been strong Mrs. Clinton, in her concession speech, sought again to embrace the mantle of change that has served Mr. Obama so well, even as she was flanked on the stage by a Mr. Clinton, his face frozen in a smile, and Madeleine K. Albright, who was Mr. Clinton’s secretary of state.

“What is most important now is that, as we go on with this contest, that we keep focused on the two big issues, that we answer correctly the questions that each of us has posed,” Mrs. Clinton said. “How will we win in November 2008 by nominating a candidate who will be able to go the distance and who will be the best president on Day One.”

Mr. Edwards in his speech suggested that he had benefited from the same electoral forces that lifted Mr. Obama to victory. “Continue on,” Mr. Edwards shouted at supporters from the stage, his voice sounding hoarse. “Thank you for second place.”

In fact, he drew 29.8 percent of the delegates awarded, to Mrs. Clinton’s 29.4 percent.

Mr. Huckabee declared victory at a boisterous rally in which he rejoiced in his ability to overcome his better-financed opponent, who had spent much of the past year building up for a victory and had hammered Mr. Huckabee with negative advertisements over the past month here.

“We’ve learned that people really are more important then the purse,” he said.

Mr. Romney will now make a stand in New Hampshire, where he has also invested heavily.

“Congratulations on the first round to Mike,” Mr. Romney said on Fox News.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, had campaigned intermittently here over the past month, at one point hoping to take advantage of the unsettled field here to come in third. Instead, he came in sixth place, garnering just 3 percent.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee face very different circumstances heading into New Hampshire and the states beyond. Polling suggested that a once overwhelming lead enjoyed by Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire was vanishing even before the results of Thursday’s vote. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have long worried that a loss here would weaken her even more going into New Hampshire, stripping her both of claims to inevitability and to electability.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama — as well as Mr. Edwards — face a rigorous and expensive run of nearly 25 contests between now and Feb. 5. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton appear far better-positioned, in terms of organization and money, to compete through that period, than Mr. Edwards. Though Mr. Edwards presented second place as a victory, he fell far short of winning — as he had once sought to do — and might find it difficult now to raise more money or find new supporters.

Compared to Mr. Obama Mr. Huckabee’s situation is much more tenuous, and his victory on Thursday did little to clarify the state of the Republican field. In New Hampshire, polls have shown Mr. McCain on the rise and little support for Mr. Huckabee. Mr. Giuliani has invested much of his time and money in Florida. And, as Mr. Romney’s advisers noted tonight, he has more a foundation of money and support in many of the coming states.

Iowa seemed particularly fertile ground for Mr. Huckabee. Polls of Republicans entering the caucus sites found that 60 percent described themselves as evangelical, and by overwhelming numbers they said they intended to vote for Mr. Huckabee.

The polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press, also left little doubt about the reasons for Mr. Obama’s convincing victory here. He did much better among young voters.

Voters here were far more interested in a candidate promising change — as Mr. Obama was — than one citing experience, the heart of Mrs. Clinton’s appeal. Half of Democrats said their top factor in choosing a candidate was someone who could bring about change. Just 20 percent said the right experience, Mrs. Clinton’s key argument, was the main factor.

For all the talk about electability, barely one in 10 respondents said it was the main factor in their decision.

There was a sharp generational break in support of the two candidates. Mr. Obama was backed by 60 percent of voters under 25 while Mrs. Clinton was supported by about 45 percent of voters over 65.

The survey of Democrats entering the caucus sites found that more than half said they were attending their first caucus — and they divided with about 40 percent for Mr. Obama and about 30 percent for Mrs. Clinton.

    Obama Takes Iowa in a Big Turnout as Clinton Falters; Huckabee Victor, NYT, 4.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04elect.html?hp

At Huckabee Central, Cheers for Evangelical Base

January 4, 2008
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

DES MOINES — Just as the Republican caucuses began on Thursday at 6:30 p.m., a small group of women and children joined hands in the middle of the ballroom at Mike Huckabee’s headquarters here and began to pray for his election.

Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, rode a crest of evangelical Christian support to victory on Thursday over his rival Mitt Romney, capping a remarkable ascent over the last two months from near the bottom of the Republican field. A poll of people entering the Republican caucuses on Thursday showed more than 8 in 10 of his supporters identified themselves as evangelicals.

The same surveys showed extraordinary turnout among evangelicals, who represented some 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers. In years past, Republican Party leaders in Iowa put evangelical turnout at about 40 percent.

Mr. Romney’s advisers had been saying that if evangelical turnout rose to more than 50 percent, victory would be impossible for Mr. Romney, whose Mormon faith is regarded as heretical by many evangelicals. Mr. Romney’s past support for abortion rights also troubled many Christian conservatives.

Despite some major stumbles in the final stretch of his Iowa campaign as he endured a ferocious assault on his record from Mr. Romney, Mr. Huckabee struck a chord among Iowa Republicans with a distinctive mixture of humor, Christian conservatism and economic populism.

His stump speeches evoked comparisons to the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan. And he charmed audiences with a witty and extemporaneous speaking style honed over 10 years in the pulpit as a preacher and local televangelist before he entered politics; he is a former governor of Arkansas. He told voters to pick a candidate who was “consistent” and “authentic,” an unstated contrast to Mr. Romney’s recent conversion to opposing abortion rights.

What most distinguished Mr. Huckabee from the rest of the Republican field, though, were his escalating appeals to the economic anxieties of lower-income voters. He emphasized his own roots as “the son of a fireman who worked a second job,” denounced stagnant wages and rising inequality, and portrayed his underfinanced fight with Mr. Romney as “the people” against “the Wall Street-to-Washington axis of power”

“People would rather elect a president who reminds them of the guy they work with, not that guy who laid them off,” Mr. Huckabee said at a campaign stop Thursday morning, invoking an implicit contrast with Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts.

The centerpiece of his economic policies is the Fair Tax, a proposal to replace all payroll and income taxes with the combination of a national sales tax and cash rebates for the poor. Enthusiasts like Mr. Huckabee describe it as a way to jump-start the nation’s economy and diminish inequality. Critics call it regressive and unworkable, and it has never gone far in Washington.

Mr. Huckabee’s success has startled and unnerved many in his own party. His campaign has met derision and doubt from all three factions of the coalition that has made up the Republican Party since the election of President Ronald Reagan: antitax, foreign policy and social conservatives.

Antitax activists fault his record of spending on transportation, education and health care as governor of Arkansas. Hawks complain that his comments about courting the good will of other nations put him to the left of some Democrats on matters of foreign affairs, and they express anger at his criticism of President Bush’s “arrogant, bunker mentality” foreign policy.

Even his natural allies among Christian conservative leaders have been slow to embrace Mr. Huckabee, in part because he sometimes appears to distance himself from their movement. He often faults fellow Christian conservatives, for example, for focusing too much on “the gestation period” in their respect for human life.

In the final days of the race, Mr. Huckabee deviated further from what has been Republican orthodoxy. He stopped merely trumpeting the taxes that he cut in Arkansas and started defending the taxes he raised to pay for better roads, schools, health care, or parks that he said benefited working people.

Just days before the caucuses, he twice reversed himself on the question of whether he would respond to Mr. Romney’s criticisms with equally pointed attacks of his own, then drew loud guffaws from a roomful of reporters for appearing to want it both ways by screening for them an attack advertisement that he said he had decided not to run.

For most of the race, Mr. Huckabee’s shoestring campaign consisted of little more than a campaign manager, a press secretary and his daughter. He could not afford polls, focus groups or expert briefings, guiding his campaign largely by instinct.

His sudden surge in the polls at times left him appearing unprepared for the questions he faced, stumbling over details like the geography of Pakistan or suggesting erroneously that more illegal immigrants came from Pakistan than any other non-Latin-American country.

Despite his ascent in Iowa, he faces daunting obstacles as he moves on to New Hampshire, where Christian conservatives are much less influential. Mr. Huckabee still badly trails the field in fund-raising. He raised less than $2.5 million in the first three quarters of 2007 and said he ended the Iowa caucus with about $2 million in the bank. By comparison, Mr. Romney raised nearly $70 million, including more than $17 million in personal loans he made to his campaign.

“God help you and thank you for all you have done,” Mr. Huckabee told his supporters on Thursday night. “And now we have a long journey ahead of us.

Mr. Huckabee has been traveling Iowa with his three dogs on his bus, and in the latest sign of the seat-of-the-pants nature of his campaign his aides were still struggling last night to find a way to transport the dogs to New Hampshire for the next leg of the race.

    At Huckabee Central, Cheers for Evangelical Base, NYT, 4.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/us/politics/04repubs.html?hp

Candidates Unleash Final Efforts in Iowa

January 2, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICK HEALY and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

DES MOINES — The presidential candidates began fanning out across Iowa early Wednesday morning — with one, John Edwards, still in the midst of a nonstop 36-hour bus tour — on the final day before the presidential caucuses, courting undecided voters and connecting with supporters to make sure they turn out to caucus Thursday evening.

One of the leading Democratic candidates, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, released a video of a 2-minute taped message that her campaign is broadcasting on all of the evening news broadcasts in Iowa Wednesday. And her message echoed the themes of many of her similarly hard-working, exhausted rivals as well.

“After all the town meetings, the pie and coffee, it comes down to this: Who is ready to be president and ready to start solving the big challenges we face on day one?” Mrs. Clinton said.

Aides for all of the candidates were also off to an early start on Wednesday, dispatching thousands of volunteers and staff members to go door to door to make last-minute appeals and arrange logistics on Thursday, such as rides to the caucuses for supporters who lack transportation.

“Most people are deciding in this last 24-hour period,” Teresa Vilmain, Mrs. Clinton’s state director, said Wednesday morning.

Mr. Edwards was perhaps the hardest-working candidate on Wednesday morning, having been up for 24 hours as he campaigned in 12 cities and towns before wrapping up the bus tour with a rally in Des Moines with John Mellencamp.

Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, dropped by one of her campaign offices in Des Moines at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to thank some of the 625 Clinton volunteers who were headed to Iowans’ homes today. The campaign has enlisted more than 5,000 drivers to ferry people to the caucuses on Thursday night.

On the Republican side, meanwhile, Senator John McCain is returning to Iowa from New Hampshire for a final burst of campaigning, hoping for a surprise third-place finish to give him additional momentum before the Jan. 8 primary in the Granite State. The two leading Republican candidates here, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, have events around the state as well.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas on Wednesday professed his support for the striking television writers union just a few hours before he was expected to board a plane to for a taping of the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno where he will face a vocal picket line of striking writers.

Mr. Leno’s program is returning to the air for the first time since the strike began on Nov. 5. Speaking to reporters, Mr. Huckabee said he was unaware that he would crossing a picket line and believed that he the program had reached a special agreement with the union.

Although crossing picket lines might not be unusual for most Republican candidates, Mr. Huckabee has waged an unusual populist campaign on economic issues, stressing his empathy with the anxieties of working people. On Wednesday, he said he identified with the striking television workers as an author himself and believed they deserved a share of the proceeds from the sale of their work.

Mr. Huckabee’s lack of knowledge about the picket lines outside the Leno show are the latest in a string of missteps that have underscored the ad hoc nature of his campaign. Last week, he made a series of small misstatements about Pakistan that raised questions about his fluency with foreign affairs and raised eyebrows by suggesting that the situation in Pakistan suggested applying special scrutiny to Pakistanis at the borders in the interest of national security.

Then six days after reversing a pledge to avoid attacking Mr. Romney, and two days ago reversed himself again to renounce those attacks.

On Wednesday, Mr. Huckabee appeared to edge back once again toward explicit swipes at his opponent. Asked by a reporter about Mr. Romney’s roughly $17 million in personal loans to his campaign, Mr. Huckabee asked how voters could expect understanding of their problems from a candidate who “writes checks for 10s of millions of dollars and doesn’t miss the money?”

In a stump speech in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Mr. Huckabee did not name Mr. Romney but made veiled references to his opponent. Alluding to Mr. Romney’s professed change of heart on abortion rights, Mr. Huckabee said he was a candidate whose views in the issue did not change depending on polls or where he was running.

“You want someone who is authentic, you want someone who is consistent, you want someone who can lead,” Mr. Huckabee said.

“Some of us come to you with the views that we had because they are convictions not political conveniences,” he said later in Mason City.

“Wouldn’t it be something if the people of Iowa proved that they cannot be bought?” he said, alluding to Mr. Romney’s heavy spending on the campaign.

Speaking reporters, he said he expected his appearance on the Jay Leno show to reach more Iowa voters than a day of appearances to crowds of a few hundred each. He said he planned to fly back to Iowa by the end of the day, spending as little time as possible out of the state. He is continuing to wage his Iowa campaign largely from the airwaves of national television, beginning Wednesday with three morning television interviews before boarding a bus for two appearances on the stump.

The final rush came in the wake of the final poll of Iowa caucus-goers by The Des Moines Register’s, showing that Senator Barack Obama was leading the Democrats and that Mike Huckabee was leading the Republicans.

Mr. Obama seemed to have a fresh bounce in his step as he set off on his first fly-around tour of Iowa. At the first of four events on the day, he addressed an audience of more than 1,000 people in Des Moines, saying: “I think 2008 is going to be a good year. That’s what I think. I think some big things might happen in 2008.”

While Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, President Bill Clinton and their campaign advisers publicly projected confidence and optimism, hitting the campaign trail with brio Tuesday morning, there was substantial surprise and consternation behind the scenes. Her first event, Ames, drew about 750 people.

Her advisers said that no one had predicted that the poll would show Mr. Obama as the preference of 32 percent of caucus-goers compared with 25 percent for Mrs. Clinton and 24 percent for John Edwards.

Soon after the Register poll was published Monday night, the Clinton camp sent out a memo questioning the methodology and the sampling, including the fact that 40 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers described themselves as independents.

“A lot of people read about this poll and were totally taken aback,” said one prominent Clinton donor in Manhattan, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen criticizing Mrs. Clinton’s operation.

Mr. Obama did not dwell on the results of the poll. Privately, his aides questioned the numbers themselves, but said the trajectory matched the momentum that they were seeing in data they are collecting hourly through telephone calls and door-to-door canvassing.

In a brief interview with reporters before his plane flew from Des Moines to Sioux City, Mr. Obama said he put more stock in what he was seeing on the ground, rather than the findings of a particular poll.

“I think it’s very hard to read what’s going on except for the fact that we’ve got these great crowds with unbelievable energy,” he said. “We’re still seeing these undecideds coming to our events, which is really exciting because it gives me a chance to persuade them one last time.

“And now, I think it’s going to come down to who gets their supporters out. I’m putting my money on my organization. It’s as good and as dedicated and as intense as I’ve ever seen.”

Mr. Edwards also took the poll as a positive note, saying, “I don’t need a poll to tell me that we’re moving. We’re moving every single day.”

Joe Trippi, an adviser to the campaign, said he was skeptical of the poll’s findings. “It doesn’t make sense at all,” he said. “You’d have to have 220,000 people voting for that poll to be right. If that’s what’s going on, there’s no historic model for it.”

Mr. Trippi, who was Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004, invoked his experience in that year’s Iowa caucus, when the Dean campaign predicted unprecedented turnouts, which never materialized. “I was the guy here last time who thought it would be 200,000 people,” he said. “It didn’t happen.”

The Clinton campaign sought to match the bad news from the poll with some good news from the donors, announcing Monday night that Mrs. Clinton had raised more than $100 million in 2007.

Still, some Clinton donors in New York who spoke on condition of anonymity said Tuesday morning that they were unnerved by the Register poll. They said that they had always been told by the Clinton high command that Iowa would be a challenge but they said they had been led to assume that Mr. Edwards would most likely come in first; they never expected an Obama blowout.

Some Clinton advisers said that if Mr. Obama has actually managed to attract a whole new crop of independent voters to the caucus process, he would be very tough to beat at the caucuses. But they expressed skepticism that the poll results would hold up, noting that the caucuses are a highly unpredictable process that would come down to whether people would actually show up at their precincts and whom they would favor for their second choice.

Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.

    Candidates Unleash Final Efforts in Iowa, NYT, 2.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/us/politics/02cnd-campaign.html?hp

After Ruling, Groups Spend Heavily to Sway Races

January 1, 2008
The New York Times
By LESLIE WAYNE

DES MOINES — Spurred by a recent Supreme Court decision, independent political groups are using their financial muscle and organizational clout as never before to influence the presidential race, pumping money and troops into early nominating states on behalf of their favored candidates.

Iowans have been bombarded over the last few days with radio spots supporting John Edwards that were paid for by a group affiliated with locals of the Service Employees International Union, which just kicked in $800,000 — on top of $760,000 already spent.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, rolled across Iowa on Monday in a customized black-and-gold bus emblazoned with his picture and the logo of the International Association of Firefighters, which has spent several hundred thousand dollars supporting him. And at campaign events in Iowa, backers in A.F.S.C.M.E. union shirts turned out Monday to show their support for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York. Those appearances come in addition to the union’s $770,000 advertising campaign promoting her candidacy.

The groups are prohibited from coordinating their efforts with the campaigns. But the candidates, while often distancing themselves from these efforts, certainly benefit from their activities. Iowa airwaves have been filled with commercials from these groups as they take advantage of the June ruling that lifted a ban on broadcast messages from independent groups within 30 days of a primary or caucus.

Independent groups also act as a vehicle for negative advertising that campaigns are reluctant to engage in. The Club for Growth, for instance, has spent $700,000 so far, largely on broadcast spots here and in other early voting states that criticize Mike Huckabee’s record on taxes while he was Arkansas governor, an effort that has received several hundred thousands of dollars from an Arkansas political rival of Mr. Huckabee, a Republican.

The shifting stand on abortion by Mitt Romney, a Republican former governor of Massachusetts, has come under attack in broadcast advertisements here and in New Hampshire from the Republican Majority for Choice, a group of Republican women who support abortion rights.

In the final two weeks before the caucuses on Thursday, independent groups have so far spent at least $5 million in Iowa, with much of the money benefiting the campaigns of Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton. During the last presidential primary election cycle, these groups spent nothing on advertising before the caucuses, largely because of the prohibition on such activity in the 30 days before nominating contests. But independent groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org played a major role in the 2004 general election.

The June ruling, in a case involving a Wisconsin anti-abortion group, allowed television issue advertisements from third-party groups — whether unions, corporations or wealthy individuals — to run right up to an election day. Under the McCain-Feingold law, which limits the role of money in campaigns, these spots had to cease 30 days before a primary election and 60 days before a general one.

“This more permissive standard,” said Kenneth Gross, a veteran campaign finance lawyer, “means there will be more money, more ads and more saturation.”

Unlike national political parties and their candidates, many of these interest groups face no limits on how much they can take in from their contributors and often do not have to disclose their donors’ names until after an election. As a result, it is difficult — if not impossible — to determine just how much money they are spending. While there is, ostensibly, an independent relationship between a campaign and these groups, restrictions on coordination between the two are considered so murky that they are often difficult to apply.

In Iowa, the efforts on behalf of or against the candidates involve not only television and radio advertisements, but also the nitty-gritty of a campaign: direct-mail brochures, bus tours, pep rallies, telephone calls, educational efforts to explain the caucuses, and traditional get-out-the-vote efforts. Independent groups pay for billboards, banners, yard signs, caps, T-shirts and mugs and set up Web sites on behalf of their favorite candidates, efforts that often look as though they were produced by the campaign itself.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is the only leading Democrat who has not attracted support from any of these groups in Iowa. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards are the biggest beneficiaries of independent efforts, largely because of the union support the two have garnered. And yet both candidates are proponents of stricter campaign finance rules.

Mr. Edwards, in particular, has made tightening such rules a cornerstone of his campaign, putting him in a delicate position as he denounces expenditures coming indirectly from some of his closest supporters, like locals of the service employees’ union.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Edwards has called on the groups, known as 527s for the section of the tax code they fall under, to stop running advertisements supporting him. But he has said he will not ask them directly.

“I do not support 527 groups,” Mr. Edwards said. “They are part of the law, but let me be clear: I am asking this group and others not to run the ads. I would encourage all the 527s to stay out of the political process.”

Mr. Dodd is getting a spirited boost from the firefighters’ association, which is traveling with him on a 23-city tour on a bus with an enormous picture of him and the union’s logo on its side.

“You can see that bus from two miles away,” said Harold Schaitberger, the union’s president, who flew in from Washington to lead the effort for the 287,000-member union.

Mr. Schaitberger declined to say how much the group planned to spend, other than that it would be “a considerable sum.”

The bus tour shows how the lines are blurred: a previous tour cost the union $100,000, while this one, using the same bus, is being paid for by the campaign. The union has also posted “hundreds” of four-foot-by-eight-foot Dodd signs, he said. Federal records show that the group also spent over $10,000 in the last few days on billboards and $102,000 on full-page advertisements in Iowa’s 23 largest newspapers last Sunday.

Emily’s List, a political action committee that supports women running as Democrats, is making a special effort for Mrs. Clinton. Its campaign is titled “You Go Girl!” and is directed at women who have never attended a caucus.

The group’s own polling showed that Mrs. Clinton had a two-to-one lead among women who had not previously attended a caucus. As a result, that group, which Emily’s List pared to 60,000 names, became the focus of its efforts with a direct-mail campaign, a phone bank and a “You Go Girl!” Web site. All efforts feature women with Midwestern accents explaining how the caucus works and urging them to support Mrs. Clinton.

“Getting someone who has not caucused to go out is the hardest effort,” said Maren Hesla, director of the effort, which she says has cost $300,000 so far and “we’re not done spending.”

The Web site is also linked to a number of Google search terms. If an Iowan searches terms like “safe toys,” “stocking stuffers” or “after-Christmas sale,” a banner advertisement with the link to the Web site will appear.

Mrs. Clinton is also the beneficiary of a $770,000 television advertising campaign from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The spot features Iowa voters talking about how Mrs. Clinton can “start this job on Day 1,” which is one of her campaign’s themes. The union estimates that it will spend more than $1 million on this television campaign.

Mr. Edwards’s efforts to distance himself from third-party efforts has not halted the ardor of some union groups campaigning on his behalf.

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners has formed a group, Working for Working Americans, that has paid around $500,000 for television spots supporting Mr. Edwards. The advertisements focus on the issue of job loss and cite the closing of the Maytag factory in Newton, Iowa. They say Mr. Edwards would end the practice of giving tax breaks to companies that move jobs overseas, and urge voters to “give voice to your values” while showing pictures of Mr. Edwards. Federal records show money for the spots came from the union’s general fund.

Mr. Edwards is also benefiting from more than $1.5 million from the Alliance for a New America, which has primarily been running a radio campaign in Iowa. While most of the money has come from service union locals, one big donation of $495,000 that came in last Friday was given by a longtime Edwards supporter.

The name of the donating entity is Oak Spring Farms, which lists its address as Central Park South in New York. The entity is a partnership between Rachel L. Mellon, the 96-year-old widow of Paul Mellon, and her lawyer, Alexander D. Forger. Oak Spring Farms had previously given $250,000 to Mr. Edwards’s One America committee, a 527 committee he set up to fight poverty.

    After Ruling, Groups Spend Heavily to Sway Races, NYT, 1.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/us/politics/01donate.html