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Democrats upbeat, but cautious, over '08 prospects

The party's presidential hopefuls lead in fundraising and online traffic. But it's too early to put much stock in such indicators.

By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 27, 2007 edition

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WASHINGTON - To judge by numbers alone, Democrats are on the glide path to the White House.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton beats the leading Republican candidates in most recent polls. Democratic candidates are raising more campaign cash than are their GOP counterparts, from far more donors. According to polls, Democratic voters are more interested in and rosier about the campaign season than are Republicans.

But what those figures mean more than a year from Election Day is far from clear. A terrorist attack in the US, a Democratic scandal, or the entry into the race of a more unifying GOP candidate could all change the dynamics of a race that is clearly tilting Democratic but is still a long way from the finish line, analysts say.

"I'm sure Republicans would rather have the Democratic numbers right now," says James Campbell, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has studied the link between early poll numbers and election results. "But these poll numbers really don't tell us a lot about what voters will be thinking and doing a year from now."

From 1948 to 2004, he noted, the presidential candidate ahead in polls just five months before Election Day won only 53 percent of the time. "Polls even as late as the June before an election really don't mean much," he said. "And we are so far away from that."

Ahead in money and online interest

There is no arguing that Democrats have momentum. President Bush's job approval ratings have dipped below 30 percent. The Democratic presidential candidates have raised nearly $179 million this year, compared with the Republicans' $115 million, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Democratic voters are paying more attention to the race than Republicans and are more than twice as likely to feel good about it, according to polls by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

If the Internet is any measure of grass-roots enthusiasm for candidates, at least among young people, the leading Democrats as a group are the hands-down favorites.

The YouTube pages of Senator Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, and former Sen. John Edwards have together drawn some 7.1 million views, versus 3 million for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and the still-undeclared former Sen. Fred Thompson, according to figures compiled by the website techpresident.com. (To be fair, the candidate with the largest YouTube following is Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the renegade Republican with single-digit poll numbers but a loyal Web constituency.)

Further, none of the leading Republican candidates has anything as elaborate as a Camp Obama, two days of boot-camp-like training for campaign volunteers.

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, suggests that the party's early edge reflects broad disenchantment with the war in Iraq and a string of Republican political scandals.

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