Because of the tiring, on-going war and sinking economy, many feel that 2008 is going to easily be a democratic year. Paul Starr does a great job at setting us straight:

[...]But as his seemingly dead campaign has been reborn, [John McCain’s] initial efforts to pander to the religious right have been forgotten, and he is once again happily running as a “maverick.” Though his nomination is hardly guaranteed, the Arizona senator would provide the GOP with a powerful mix of continuity and change — continuity with the Bush administration on Iraq at a moment when it has become conventional wisdom that the “surge” is succeeding, and a sense of change and freshness from McCain’s cheerfully frank past deviations from conservative orthodoxy.
[...]

Sen. Barack Obama appeals strongly to affluent whites and minorities — the old John Lindsay coalition — but he seems to lose working-class whites. Moreover, if the pollsters turn out to have been wrong in predicting the outcome in New Hampshire in part because of the “Bradley effect” — that is, the polling tendency to overestimate the number of votes a black candidate will win because some bigoted whites refuse to speak to pollsters or claim to be undecided — then Democrats may also be deceiving themselves about the Illinois senator’s chances in the general election. National surveys that show Obama beating various Republicans may be overstating his potential share of the vote.

For her part, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has done better at appealing to lower- and middle-income whites, especially women. But her loss to Obama among male voters in New Hampshire suggests that just as race may block Obama’s path to the presidency, so gender may obstruct hers. That’s hardly a surprise, of course. But Democrats have been so excited about the prospect of a historical breakthrough that many of them seem to forget that plenty of voters are still swayed by old prejudices.

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