Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Obama scores upset in Connecticut

A late surge in popularity helped Barack Obama win over a previously heavily favored Hillary Clinton yesterday.

Obama scored in six of the eight counties, with Clinton winning only in the 2nd District. Joe Courtney was the one Democratic Representative who wasn't actively supporting Obama, and he either helped Clinton to win in his district, or he accurately predicted what his electorate would do.

Voter gender wasn't an issue, as Obama won even though nearly 60% of the Democratic voters were women. He won most notably with younger Democrats, and I think the "youth vote" (under 35) may be a deciding factor in November. GOTV among that demographic might make the difference. Something to plan for.

At this point Obama has an opportunity to capitalize on his momentum. Large rallies like his Hartford appearance seem to energize the Democrats, and nothing looks more thrilling than an arena packed with 17,000 supporters cheering for their candidate. Somehow, I don't see Clinton being able to generate that kind of excitement.

The pundits will be scrutinizing the results of these contests for at least the next 72 hours, then this Saturday we'll see additional Democratic contests in Louisiana, Washington and Nebraska. It'll be interesting to see how things develop from here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

After Obama’s amazing win in Connecticut last night,
I had to reach out some way to say thanks to the voters of Ct.
So I have selected your blog(thanks google;0--
Thanks Conneticut, for the successful effort in converting
the Clinton advantage to a win for Obama.

I am a Perot, Clinton, Clinton, Edwards,(ruted from afar)for Lamont –voter, who purposely held out voting in the GA primary yesterday. Why?? I wanted to
make sure this surge of Obama’s is real before assigning my vote instantly to the Democratic
(media projected) frontrunner.

I’ve perused various blogs and what I’ve read---
is that Obama is unifying the democratic
party----which should not be overlooked by the DNC! I now believe (after reading many
posted comments from Republican voters now joining the Obama team) he will be the best candidate to bring in the Independents,the Democrats who jumped ship re: the blue dress ---and the many disenfranshised Republicans.

I am happy to say I now share your excitement!

Just because I’m a woman---I’m not going to automatically assign my vote to a woman—and just because I’m an African American, I’m
not going to assign my vote to an African American(hello Jesse Jackson).

The economy, education, lost jobs, and who voted on the Iraq war are important to me. I wish the media would stop feeding the race “machine-ism” and start reading some blogs!

CT Bob said...

Thanks for the nice thoughts.

Yes, Google is my friend. I've written about that previously. If you search for "primary schedule", this blog is at the top of the results.

If you haven't seen the video from Monday's Obama rally, it's right on the top of the "Featured Videos" in the right side column. It was inspiring.

One thing I noticed at the rally was the diversity of the crowd. Scanning with my video camera, I saw a perfect representation of our nation's peoples - young, old, male, female, Caucasian, African-American, Latino, Asian-American, etc.

It was a wonderful contrast to that awful McCain rally I attended the day before, where the crowd was largely white and mostly male.

Obama will hopefully be the unifier that our nation so desperately needs.