Straw Poll, Part II

Well, the results are in, with over 13,000 votes, and a margin of error of 90% (since we're not normal Democrats around here), the results of the first dKos presidential straw:

Daily Kos community poll. 6/20. 13,389 respondents. (No trend lines):

Clark            26   (3,496)
No Freakin' Clue 17   (2,320)
Clinton          10   (1,461)
Feingold         10   (1,433)
Edwards           8   (1,077)
Other             7   (1,088)
Warner            5     (689)
Richardson        4     (659)
Biden             3     (497)
Kerry             2     (341)
Bayh              2     (328)
Vilsack           0      (88)

While there's no way we can pretend that the Daily Kos community is representative of the Democratic Party electorate at large, this poll is a good indicator of where the Daily Kos community is at. The results didn't change more than a percentage point here and there from when there were 1,500 votes.

So what do we know? The field is clearly wide open, and there's a sense that we can do better than this lot. Gore, in particular, seems to have a lot of potential support if he were to express interest in running (he hasn't).

Clark, who is dismissed by the early CW, has a clear leg up, but it's not a dominant position by any stretch of the imagination. He's just the only guy who's standing out from the crowd.

Here's my bold prediction: the first candidate (or potential candidate) to come out for a full withdrawl from Iraq will get a huge groundswell of support. It may be one of these guys, or it may be someone out from left field.

But it's clear that even among the Daily Kos community, those who voted for the Bush's Iraq War aren't being penalized. The two candidates against the war from day one -- Feingold and Clark, are only splitting 39 percent of the vote.

One more thing -- there aren't organized campaigns yet, so there weren't any official efforts by campaigns to spam the poll. Future efforts may be more tainted by such things and will likely require security measures to protect the integrity of these polls.

For now, I plan on having one of these every month (or so).