Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Oprah has only been stumping with Obama for a few days now, so it’s unlikely that any poll would show a clear increase in support for him as a result , but I still think that Daniel Larison is wrong about how this will affect Obama in the longer term:

 The new CBS/NYT poll has a question (number 45) asking Democratic voters how Oprah’s support for Obama would affect their preferences: 1% said it would make them more likely to vote for him, while 14% said it would make them less likely.  I think this runs against the conventional wisdom that Oprah’s popularity is a boon to Obama.  She has probably deeply annoyed a small but significant number of people over the years.

It’s unclear how much those “annoyed” by Oprah overlap with Obama supporters, or more importantly, if any of these voters would change their mind as a result of Oprah’s support.  More importantly, the poll Larison cites is a poll of registered voters.  From what I hear, a good portion of the 18,000 strong crowd in Des Moines were voters new to the Obama campaign and were unregistered.  If  Obama can get 3,000 previously unregistered voters to support him, that’s about a 2.5% jump in the caucus.  Of course, this is all idle speculation, but it’s just hard to imagine a scenario whereby Obama gets 18,000 people to show up at an event in a state where only 124,000 participated in the 2004 caucus and that hurts him.