What will the ‘Hillary Democrats’ do?

Which man will they stand behind?

A lot has been written about the hardcore Hillary supporters and whether they will carry out their threat to support McCain instead of Obama. From what I can gather these fall into three categories; affluent (and so not affluent) female supporters who supported her because they wanted to see a women in the White House, working families who agreed with Hillary on trade and healthcare and voters who were more anti-Obama than pro-Clinton. The most interesting of these groups is the first group, since they are a component of the Democratic party that Obama should have been able to take for granted. These supporters, epitomised by the website ‘Hillary is 44’, with their pistols in the hem of their pantsuits, have supposedly been flooding McCain phonebanks and pledging support. Indeed, the extract above demonstrates their current mood at the moment. The question is whether McCain can retain their support while making sure he can use values issues to win over the latter two groups.

My view is that many of them will probably return to Obama, but not before they have donated money to McCain, giving him a nice boost in funds and forcing Obama to spend time, money and political capital. I also believe that McCain should quietly use his more socially liberal supporters, such as Rudolph Giuliani, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to recruit some of them, while making sure that his campaign initally focuses on ‘soft values’ (such as pornography and lewdness), rather than abortion and gay marriage, for as long as possible. In contrast, Obama needs to use his female surrogates and put as much pressure as possible to get Hillary Clinton out there and start corralling her supporters, though he should leave the ‘Chicago-style’ diplomacy to others, considering what happened with Lieberman.