Jerome Armstrong of the left wing blog MyDD has put together a handy chart of recent online straw polls conducted by the movers and shakers in the netroots community: DailyKos, MyDD, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and Democrats.com.

Obviously, these aren't scientific surveys, so it's hard to say the results represent anything more than the general pulse of the activist left. That said, John Edwards won four out of the six preference surveys aggregated by Armstrong (a couple of those by comfortably large margins), Obama finished second in four out of the six, and Hillary Clinton mustered only single digit support in five out of the six.

Compare that with the latest RCP Average of recent national preference polls for the Democratic nomination:

Two very different pictures.

Last week Chris Bowers (also a blogger at MyDD) floated the theory that national polls are vastly overestimating support for Hillary Clinton. Armstrong makes a similar point with this observation:

The netroots is the real world of politics. Polls have shown (Hotline '06) that a strong plurality of Democrats read blogs and nearly all of them (Pew) vote; we are a majority in primaries. Look to where the contrast of netroots-favored vs establisment-candidate played out in the primaries of '06 (MT, CT, VA). The question is whether the world of the netroots leads the world of primary voters in a Presidential election. The '04 of Iowa is an apt comparison, but it only goes so far --the net/blogs are 100x+ larger in readership now vs then. [snip]

We are still 9 months away from the first votes, and something is going to give. The status quo scenario (the contrast continuing as is) leads to Clinton under-performing in the actual vote vs the polls; but it seems more likely that either Clinton is going start climbing among the netroots or she is going to start falling in the polls.

Maybe. If you look at the state numbers, Edwards is ahead of Clinton in Iowa - which is more in line with what appears to be the general sense of the netroots - while Clinton is leading in New Hampshire. Remember, Independents are the largest voting bloc in New Hampshire and this year 2/3 of them indicate they're going to vote in Democratic primary. So it doesn't necessarily follow that Clinton's popularity with the netroots has to rise for her to win or do very well in New Hampshire - though I would agree that her ability to win NH would probably be made harder by a dismal showing in Iowa.

Beyond that, however, we move into a discussion about the size and significance of the netroots in a pseudo-national primary on Feb. 5 where the premium will be on cash for advertising and name recognition - both things Mrs. Clinton has plenty of.