by WonkoKevin

Almost 60% of all the political buzz in Wonkosphere was focused on Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, and Hillary Clinton yesterday, one day post-Iowa. It would appear the Wonkosphere wanted at least one day to digest Iowa before turning its focus to New Hampshire. Clinton’s liberal buzz share went up from 20 to 25%–BUT her tone amongst liberal bloggers was below-average for the tenth straight day. So far her campaign has unveiled nothing dramatically new except a greater focus on youth-oriented policy. But surely she understands that Obama’s appeal to youth is not policy-based, no? Obama and Huckabee both got 5% bumps in buzz share from their wins, with Obama being mentioned in over 1000 posts in a 24-hour period, and Huckabee not far behind. Obama’s liberal tone and Huckabee’s conservative tone were both well above the average. John Edwards lost 7 percentage points (22 to 15%), as did Fred Thompson, not good portends. Rudy Giuliani was below 10% buzz share for the 13th of the last 14 days, Mitt Romney entered the ninth straight day when his tone amongst conservatives was below average, and John McCain stayed constant in buzz share, surprising given his assumed front-runner status will be tested in only four days.

We haven’t seen any new polling come out of New Hampshire post-Iowa, so I’ll go out on a limb and say that I think bloggers are under-estimating the bounce Obama and Huckabee will get. Conservative bloggers are quick to point out that evangelicals are a rarer bread in NH, and thus Huckabee can’t hope for much of a bounce. Maybe they are right, but I think Huckabee’s strength exists beyond evangelicals, especially given the lack of excitement for the rest of the field. I don’t think Huck will win, but I think he may well come in second place. On the Dems side, polls pre-Iowa have Obama just a bit behind Clinton, and again I think people are underestimating the “tipping point” that Obama’s large victory has triggered. People in NH need to commit less time, have much more time to vote, and can vote behind a curtain. NH has more youth and independent, whole break Obama’s way. Again without the benefit of any polling, my guess is we could see a 55-30-15 win for Obama.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 7:24 am and is filed under Horse race, Huckabee, Clinton, Politics 2.0, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.