Yes, this is more on the Obama youth vote, which may have been beaten to death at this point. But, I'd like to add two observations -- one anecdotal and one with numbers -- to the story.
More below....
Point#1
A month or two back, there was a discussion on discussion on TPMTVbetween Markos and Josh Marshall on the strenghts and weaknesses of the various campaigns. The two agreed that the Obama campaign was the worst among Democrats at "blog outreach" and were "ineffective" in utilizing the internets via the blogs.
I just visited the Obama website for the first time looking for my local (St. Louis) online community. I found not one, but about twenty. The online organizing seems very effective, but very de-centralized. Even more de-centralized than the netroots.
I've only heard about Obama's MySpace site (on account of I'm an old Gen-Xer, and don't know how to use my-space).
Question / Hypothesis : Has Obama snubbed internet 2.0 (blogs) in favor of internet 3.0 (social networking sites, small online communities)?
Point#2:
Democrats had great turnout, and all of the big-3 did pretty well last night. But Obama's support was significantly under-estimated by the polls. Yes, the polls don't account for second-choices, but Edwards was the primary beneficiary of those.
According to entrance polls, Obama got 35% of the first-choice vote. Only ONE of the numerous polls leading up to the vote put him that high -- his trend line was at 27.7%. Compared to entrance poll first-choice results, the polls consistently over-estimated Hillary, under-estimated Obama and were pretty much on the money with Edwards.
This is consistent with the growing hand-wringing by pollsters over the "cell-phone" generation. Polls frequently understimate support when that support comes from younger voters -- partly due to phone sampling, but of course, also due to changes in demographic weighting models, etc.
So, that's my two-cents. If this holds true, Obamas support may be much stronger than we would guess by reading blogs and watching polls.
The average Kossack is probably younger than me, but the average Obaman may be younger than the average Kossack. The netroots are obviously still relevant, but they may no longer be the whole story of the young and online vote.
Disclosure: I'll probably vote for Obama -- but I like Edwards a lot too.