No McGrath, most Clinton supporters would vote for Obama and vice versa.

The question is, which candidate can beat the Republican base and steal the independent voters back from the Republican party, in order to win in November.

My bet had been on Hilary, until I saw how broke she was. Why bet on Hilary? She has the biggest, best oiled political machine.

Obama is having to buy and build as he goes, and with a pool of very fickle 'new' voters--the youth vote, which is notorious for evaporating over night.

But even if the youth vote would disappear if Obama loses to Clinton (which it won't, I think at least some will still be excited to elect the first woman president), Clinton still has the Democratic party base behind her. The African American vote won't go to McCain. A lot of them might stay home on Election Day, but not enough to hurt Clinton where it counts--the big states, which she carried pretty handily yesterday without the African American vote.

Hard core Dems only need their base to win. Republicans, because there are far fewer of them as registered voters, can never win with just their base alone, which is why McCain is the best candidate for the Repubs this year. McCain does really well with independents and Reagan Democrats.

The unknown factor in this race really, is how will the Reagan Democrats (or the conservative white male Democrats) and independents (who in many states now make up a growing and large percentage of registered voters) vote in November. In 2000, the majority of them supported McCain when he was in the race, and most of them ended up voting for Bush. Same thing happened in 2004, when most of them voted again for Bush.

So the truth is, no one knows, we are all just ruminating here. I have a tendency to piss off the Obama voters, because they are voting based on feelings for the man. I don't vote like that, so when I challenge their thinking, their emotions tend to color their responses in a way that doesn't happen with me, is all.

Hell, even Little Hawk figured that much out.

There aren't very many American posters here at Mudcat that don't identify with the partisan Democrats, whether they are registered Democrats or not. So if you are looking for a solid analysis of what is happening in American politics, you can't really go by the conventional political wisdom of this forum, because it skews so partisan Democrat. And the more their beliefs about their chosen candidate gets challenged directly, the nastier they get.

Think about it McGraw. Just as many Democrats voted for Hilary Clinton on Tuesday as voted for Obama--and they weren't all women, either. So where are the Clinton supporters here at Mudcat? You see the problem here? This forum is very much a closed shop as far as the political spectrum goes in the US. You get a lot of what we call in the US the True Believers. People who tend to get overly emotional (usually anger and hatred towards the other side is their motivator), and who are over attached to their own political beliefs.

The True Believers are both Dem and Repub ideologues (even if they aren't registered as members of the party) and they engage in the vast majority of political demagoguing in our political conversations.

Take politics out of the mix, and they seem very normal and nice. Have a political conversation, and they turn True Blue or True Red.