Which Democrat is a winner?

With the Iowa caucuses looming, victory-hungry Democrats want to know -- who is the most "electable"? Here's our best (totally wild) guess as to how each candidate might fare in November.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, Bill Richardson, News, Walter Shapiro, Joseph Biden, John Edwards, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Chris Dodd

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Democratic presidential hopefuls (from left) John Edwards, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd assemble before the Dec. 13 Des Moines Register debate in Johnston, Iowa.

Dec. 29, 2007 | DES MOINES, Iowa -- Teesha and Karl Kirschbaum are camping out in their empty house in Clear Lake (110 miles north of here) just so they can caucus on Jan. 3. The young couple are moving to Seattle -- and their furniture and clothes were packed up and shipped west the day after Christmas. But the Kirschbaums, who were both avid supporters of Howard Dean in 2004, have stayed behind with a few possessions and their dueling Hillary (Teesha's) and Obama (Karl's) signs on the front lawn.

Karl, who builds racing cars, is firm in his preference for Obama. "It's going to take a lot to swing my vote -- and it won't be my wife," he said defiantly in mid-December when I met him at a going-away party for the couple at the Coffee Cat cafe in Mason City. But Teesha was shaky in her allegiance in a way that would be familiar to many caucus-goers. "I'm leaning Hillary," she said at the party. "But I'll probably decide for sure when I'm in the room on caucus night. This year I like them all."

Desperate to detect a trend in this land of deadlocked Democratic polls, I telephoned Teesha (a vocational rehabilitation specialist) on Thursday to gauge the sentiments of this one-woman focus group. "I still don't know," she said, after describing herself sitting in an empty room aside from a single chair and her laptop. "It all comes down to who has the best chance of winning."

Electability may be the most important factor churning in the minds of the undecided and loosely aligned voters whose last-minute decisions will tilt the caucuses. "The undecideds are just sitting there," said Julie Jensen, the Iowa coordinator for Chris Dodd. "We had an event in Des Moines last night for 100 people -- and half of them were undecided."

Longtime Iowa Democratic strategist Pete D'Alessandro, who is on the sidelines in the Democratic presidential race, noted that, traditionally, electability is not a major factor in the party primaries. "But it might be part of what people are looking for in Iowa this year," he said. "Still, if electability is part of the equation, you should be seeing a surge for [Joe] Biden, Dodd or [Bill] Richardson."

Fence-sitting Democrats can check the candidates' Web sites for their positions on issues, or they can rank their favorites based on how often they use buzzwords like "change" and "experience" in their TV commercials. But when it comes to determining which Democrat is most likely to beat the Republicans next November, there is no right answer or even much reliable data.

Four years ago, Iowa Democrats went for John Kerry in large measure because they believed that this Vietnam War hero would offer the strongest challenge to George W. Bush. These caucus-goers could not have foreseen that Kerry would be photographed windsurfing and that his consultant-clogged campaign would fritter away a month before it made a half-hearted effort to respond to the Swift Boat ads. And predicting the arc of the Kerry campaign was theoretically possible since the Massachusetts senator had been in Washington for 20 years and everyone knew his opponent.

This time around, all bets are off. A campaign against John McCain -- the only major-league Washington figure in the GOP race -- might require a different kind of candidate than a battle against a former governor like Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney. And if Rudy Giuliani were somehow the GOP nominee, the unprecedented campaign calculus would probably blow the circuits on a supercomputer.

Theoretically, it might be possible to calculate electability based on horse-race numbers in the national polls. But since the Republican candidates (even Giuliani and McCain) remain ill-defined figures to many voters, it is difficult to find much meaning in head-to-head competitions. A national NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, conducted in mid-December, found that Clinton would defeat Giuliani by a margin of 46 to 43 percent in a hypothetical matchup. But if Barack Obama were the Democratic nominee, the gap would widen to 49 to 40 percent, according to the survey.

Nearly 11 months before the presidential election, differences like this are not meaningful, even before you throw in the poll's 3 percent margin of error. So many things can change -- both in terms of the images of the candidates and the problems facing the nation -- that all crystal balls should come with the kinds of warning labels emblazoned on cigarette packs.

Contemplating electability would make anyone feel like an oafish detective missing an obvious clue. Everything will be apparent in hindsight, but for now victory-hungry Democrats will have to make do with little more than hunches and half-truths. But here are some (let's be honest here) guesses about how the six Democrats competing in Iowa, who do not include Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, might fare in November as the nominee.

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