Atrios asks, “The question really is about why Obama can raise $5 million in a day and (presumably) Clinton can’t. I actually don’t really have an answer. Thoughts? Both of them are capable of getting lots of people to vote for them.”
The answer here speaks to the difference between the campaigns. I think a lot of us conceive of supporters of a certain candidate as basically following a bell curve distribution. There’s the great mass of low-information, soft supporters, and then an increasingly small number of highly-informed, highly-active advocates. This mental picture has an implicit ratio to it — imagine, for the sake of argument, that our bell curve has a 50:1 ratio of middle (soft) supporters to tail (intense) supporters. What we tend to do then is take a candidacy like Obama’s, notice that he has way more intense supporters, and assume he has a proportionate amount more soft supporters.
But what if he follows a power law distribution? All intense supporters, very little soft middle? That’s what happened with Dean, and to a lesser extent, it’s true for Obama. He’s got a ton of intense supporters, and so way more buzz, money, and organizing than Clinton, but isn’t pulling in proportionate vote totals. And Clinton, by contrast, has more supporters than Obama — at least according to the polls — but they’re soft, they don’t volunteer, they don’t write checks.
