* view of most electable, USA overall, Clinton is at 62%, Obama 12%, Edwards 11%. It’s 48-18-15 in Iowa, 56-16-12 in New Hampshire, and 60-17-8 in South Carolina.

* refusal to vote for a specific candidate, USA overall, Clinton is at 9%, Obama 8%, Edwards 6%. It’s 18-3-3 in Iowa, 15-6-2 in New Hampshire, and 8-8-4 in South Carolina.

Meanwhile, there’s some interesting additional reading to be found:

Indeed, Hillary’s entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed healthcare plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. …

But schadenfreude doesn’t really do justice to Hillary’s potential downfall. Her career is indisputably a product of her marriage — no one running on her experience as first lady could claim otherwise. But for most of her life, Hillary had an independent ideological identity that seems to have gone down the memory hole. In her own words, she championed a whole new “politics of meaning” and sought to redefine “who we are as human beings in this postmodern age.”

But, bit by bit, she sliced off chunks of her soul. Hillary used to be the personification of hope for the left. On the welfare debate, she was supposed to be Bill’s conscience. She was the Eleanor to his Franklin.

But now Hillary is the Democrats’ establishment candidate, pitted against the true believer, John Edwards, and the idealist, Barack Obama. Even committed liberals tell focus groups she’s too cold, too calculating.

Heh, heh. The return of Clinton polarization could do her in.

Just look at the story in the Washington Post

Note that this coming election it may be 2006 revisited, with a lot of dissatisfaction with Bush and the Iraq war. If it’s substantial enough, even many normally-Republican voters (as in 2006) may vote Democratic.

The Pew polls consistently show so-called (self-named) “independent” voters as voting in patterns just like Democrats.

That’s true also, by the way, of the so-called “moderates” [sic] on this so-called “moderate” [sic] Web site.

SD, I do not share your view of doom for this country. Sooner or later the GOP will regain its senses or be taken over by others who can offer Americans a positive, constructive alternative to an ever-growing welfare state in Washington who is our surrogate parent with benefits and entitlements for all. If they concentrated merely on being the party better representing than they do the people who pay the bills in this country, as opposed to the dependent, greedy, impatient children whose votes are bought with promises of More Goodies, they might do better, especially in the coming years when tax increases will be imperative (along with benefit reductions where politically possible) to maintain Social Security and Medicare.

The real question is whether the Democratic Party gets 60 seats in the Senate in 2008 or has to wait until 2010. Of course, Senate races are too boring for political writers to write about. The most underreported story in how over 100 Democrats running for re-election for Congress are currently running unopposed.

The other underreported election is how the Republicans have stopped being a national party. Just look at the story in the Washington Post that most independents are actually Democrats but just do not want to admit it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121700502.html

The Pew report about Democrats that was made public earlier this month (here) discusses electability of the candidates as one of the issues.

Related to this is the newest report from Pew (here) ,which discusses issues on the public’s mind in 2007. Among them are:

* A political landscape favoring Democrats

* GOP blues

I suspect that electability rather than policy positions on various issues will be behind more Democratic votes than is currently suspected. I suspect the Democratic voters want first and foremost to see a Democrat put in the White House, in order to fully enjoy the “end of Bush” parties they will want to have on Election Night and on Inauguration Day.