Newsweek
by Andrew Romano

Want to know what Obama Country looks like? See above.

On Sunday afternoon, 75,000 supporters padded down to the Waterfront Bowl in the fair city of Portland, Ore. for the Illinois senator’s largest rally to date. Sixty thousand got in; the remaining 15,000 watched from outside the gates. The opening act was The Decemberists, a bespectacled indie-rock band that laces its bookish songs about legionnaires and architects with words like “palanquin” and “fontanelle”; John Mellencamp they are not. With its backdrop of twee little tugboats and sprawling audience of mellow, well-read young urbanites, the event neatly reinforced the conventional wisdom–i.e., that the Beaver State is a progressive paradise ripe for Obama’s taking in tomorrow’s primary. And the polls agreed. By the time Obama appeared on stage in his shirtsleeves, no survey taken since the start of May showed the Democratic frontrunner with anything less than an 11-point lead over Hillary Clinton. The latest poll pegged his margin at 20 percent.

Also worth nothing: Oregon votes entirely by mail–meaning the results are largely (to coin a phrase) signed, sealed and delivered at this point. According to PPP, Obama “is likely to win a dominant victory tomorrow in Oregon. In fact, “given how many people have already voted and how strongly they’re going for Obama, there’s a decent chance he’s already won the primary based on the ballots already filled out. 74% of respondents said they had already voted, and among them Obama has a 60% to 39% advantage.” In comparison, only one-third of Suffolk respondents said they’d voted–even though about two-thirds of Oregonians overall had mailed in their ballots at the time of the survey. That should tell you something about the accuracy of their stats–and hint at the size of Obama’s victory.

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