Taking the temperature of the Dems

Now that everyone has had a day to digest what happened on Tuesday, here is where it seems things stand:

• HRC disclosed that she lent her campaign $5 million dollars.
  
• Since the polls closed on Tuesday HRC has a very impressive 4 million dollars (almost). The problem is that Obama is reporting that he has raised more than 7.5, As a reminder Obama raised more than twice as much money in January (30 million to 14 million).
• Both candidates seemed to have pulled in the same amount of delegates on Tuesday with a slight edge to Obama winning 13 out of the 22 contests that have been decided (NM still counting).
• HRC still has the overall delegate lead because of the Super Delegates, however, only 300 of the 800 available Supers have committed and over the last couple of weeks the majority of the commits have been to Obama. It would be unfortunate if these end up determining the race and they decide to go against the people's choice (whomever that may end up being) but that is something to keep in mind.

The next week should bring a lot of good news to Obama supporters with some opportunity for HRC to sell herself as the upset candidate as most of the upcoming contests this weekend are caucuses, and we all saw how well Obama showed in the caucus states on Tuesday winning all of them by a wide margin. From looking at Survey USA's Presidential matchups in Washington State it is clear that Obama is seen as the far more electable candidate against Romney or McCain and that does not bode well for HRC in a state with 97 delegates at stake.

There are 447 pledged (in addition to another 152 Super delegates that may have already committed) on the table of for the Democrats over the next few weeks, and if Obama performs in the caucuses as he did last week, he figures to pickup a sizeable enough net after this weekends caucuses. Tuesday figures to be a good day for him in the Potomac/Beltway Primary and after contests in Wisconsin and Hawaii offer Obama a shot at actually building up a lead heading towards Texas and Ohio on March 4th.