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The Great Snipe Hunt of 2008Tracking the much discussed Hillary-turned-McCain voters.

By John DickersonPosted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 11:23 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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And even if Irma represents the views of swing-state Hillary supporters and hasn't changed her mind yet, she may not remain in that camp for long. It's true that over the last couple of months, polls that asked Clinton supporters whether they would defect to McCain found as many as 30 percent who were willing to do so. But these polls, taken in the heat of a Democratic primary fight, were meaningless. I agree with Kerry's 2004 pollster Mark Mellman, who likens the polls of Clinton's supporters at their keenest moment of disappointment to asking women (or men) in the middle of a heated marital argument about their Valentine's Day plans. In the NBC post-primary poll, tempers were already cooling: Only 19 percent of Clinton supporters said they'd vote for McCain.

As my colleague Emily Bazelon has pointed out, if you're a voter who cares about the issues Hillary Clinton championed, Barack Obama is your candidate. Now that he's the only Democrat in the race, when he talks about the policy positions women care about, his is the only voice they hear. And he knows exactly where his target audience lives, which is the first key to convincing them. The Obama campaign has a list of the swing-state women who supported Hillary (either from their own canvassing during the primaries or because Clinton will hand over her list). They'll be able to target them directly.

Obama is clearly trying to sound the right notes to hasten the healing process. On Wednesday, he made an impromptu stop at an eighth-grade graduation at the Young Women's Leadership Charter School of Chicago. "I want every young woman to be thinking this summer about how you are going to start hitting the books early? How are you going to start getting a leg up on high school? What books are you going to read, instead of watching TV? What kinds of new knowledge can you gain? Because what I want you to be doing every single minute of every single day is thinking about how can I make myself the best possible young woman that I can be?"

There's already some polling that suggests that Obama is improving his standing with women. According to the latest Gallup poll, in a head-to-head matchup with McCain, Obama is now matching Clinton's performance among women, with a 13-point lead among female voters. In the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Obama also leads McCain by seven points among white women. This is perhaps the most crucial swing portion of the electorate as a whole. George Bush won white women by 11 points in 2004. Not all white women were Clinton supporters, of course, so these polls aren't a precise measure of Obama's inroads into the camp of Hillary defectors. But Obama couldn't have improved his standing with women as much has he has since clinching the nomination without a big boost from those who once supported his Democratic rival.

How will we know whether Obama continues to pick up Clinton's previous support? The polls will tell us, and there will be other signs. Can the leaders of anti-Obama factions show that they represent real groups, rather than hyping their status to keep their places in the media spotlight? Is the McCain campaign putting money and resources into going after the Hillary voters it claims to be courting? Or is this a sleight of hand designed to trick Obama into defending his base so that he doesn't have time to go after independent voters?

The Nobama Hillary Clinton voter may prove to be more enduring than my skepticism suggests. Heck, she may be the new Soccer Mom. In that case, welcome—the presidential campaign needs a new cliché each cycle, and we've already used up the Office-Park Dads and NASCAR voters. Now all we'd have to do is come up with a new name. Nobama Mama? Send your better suggestion to me at so we'll be ready if it turns out these voters really do have a big role to play.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of Sen. Hillary Clinton by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I'm in a red state. Speaking purely theoretically, if Hillary Clinton was to run for president in the general election, the only possible way she could win South Carolina is if the entire state was rained on by a major meteor storm that just managed to miss the cities of Columbia and Charleston... and even then she'd only have a ~5% chance.

So, I had the opportunity to be an asshole about my seething dislike of Hillary during the primary... and swear absolutely that I would not vote for her during the general.

I wouldn't have either... because my vote doesn't really matter here.

In 2000, a few hundred voters in Florida determined the entire election... so I'm certain that the ~100,000 Nader supporters in Florida have been kicking themselves for the last 8 miserable years... but I doubt any Nader supporters from New York or Wyoming really worry about what their spiteful vote portended.

The key, in either determining you will cast a spiteful vote or in evaluating the effect of your spiteful vote, is looking at whether you believe your vote makes a difference.

I imagine there will be a lot of spiteful Hillary voters that stay home in West Virginia and Tennessee this year... because there is a perception that those states are simply out-of-play... So who the hell cares how any individual votes. The same will be true of New York and California.

But I imagine that most of the voters in the swing states and the close states will bite their pride and cast the vote they know that they should.

One concern that I have is the fact that the map is changing... and states like North Carolina, Virginia, and even Louisiana, are not nearly as comfortable for Republicans as the Republicans would like... and states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey aren't as comfortable for the Democrats as the Democrats would like.

So the real threat from the disaffected Hillary support is in a traditional solid state that has weaker support than normal... but I expect the horse-race polling will help the Hillary zealots to know whether they need to worry or not. I imagine that if either Obama or McCain has more than a 4-6% lead going into November, you'll see a lot of spite voting... If it's closer than that, you probably won't.

Who wants to sit in the shoes of the Florida Nader voters for the next 4 years?

--Tundrayeti

(To reply, click here.)

Hillary's campaign survived past the New Hampshire primary as a result of sexism—in her advantage. Those near-tears rescued what, to that point, had been a strategic and rhetorical disaster.

If a man had gotten choked up at that New Hampshire diner and said: "I just don't want to see us fall backward," his campaign would have been over.

His opponent (especially Hillary) would have labeled him a wimp, not strong enough to take the pressure of the presidency. And, to be honest, she wouldn't have had to press that label: We all would have thought the same thing. Don't believe me? History has plenty of fairly recent examples.

Sexism goes both ways, Nobamas. I know you want to own that burden. But, to some extent, sexism is a load we all impose on each other and that we all must carry—even if it is distributed unequally.

--SilasPorter

(To reply, click here.)

(6/13)

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