Lemmings for Kerry
Duncan Watts (sociology professor at Columbia), over at Slate, touches on why primary voters will vote for Kerry despite not liking him.

One answer may be found in a series of psychology experiments conducted at Princeton University in the 1950s. Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch showed a room of participants a series of slides displaying sets of vertical lines. Two of these lines were clearly the same length, while the others were obviously very different. The subjects were then given the seemingly trivial task of identifying which pair of lines were the same. But there was a trick: Everyone in the room except for one person had been instructed beforehand to give the same incorrect answer. The real subject of the experiment was the lone unwitting participant, and the real test was of an individual's ability to disagree with his or her peers.

Asch demonstrated a stunning effect: Faced with a decision that, in isolation, no one would ever get wrong, the unwitting subjects went against the evidence of their own eyes about one-third of the time. In psychology, Asch's result is famous, yet its implications for what we might call "social decision-making" (decisions that are influenced by the previous decisions of others) are largely unappreciated by the general public, or even researchers who study decision-making. And social decisions are everywhere. From the everyday (choosing a movie or a restaurant) to the profound (choosing a religion or a career), each one of us is influenced consciously and unconsciously by our friends, families, colleagues, and role models in ways that make the boundary between what we decide for ourselves and what others decide for us almost impossible to distinguish.

This much is fairly obvious. What is a bit more intriguing, as Watts writes, is that the whole storyline of this primary season could be different. Sort of like the parallel universe ideas mentioed at the beginning of the classic film "slacker." For instance, had Edwards grabbed a few more points in Iowa, and especially if S.C. were next- he'd be the front runner now. And the story line about the inevitability of this would be presented. Writes Watts:

In fact, the combination of cascades and hindsight bias renders much of what passes for "obvious" in this election campaign deeply misleading. Because the cascade is effectively driven by a small minority of voters, the result is more or less arbitrary--Dean really could be winning just as easily as Kerry. But once we know the answer, hindsight bias kicks in and makes the arbitrariness of the cascade (seem to) go away. Everything pundits are saying about Dean now could just as easily be used (and would have been used) to 'explain' a Dean victory. Had that happened instead, we would all be walking around saying, "Well, of course Kerry lost--he's got all the charisma of a dead horse--and that Dean is a real firebrand." In each of these "parallel worlds," Dean and Kerry are exactly the same (more or less), and voters are (more or less) exactly the same as well. In terms of the inputs, the difference between the two worlds could be a coin toss. And yet the results, along with our collective memory of what happened and why, are absolutely, completely different, and we can't even imagine now what that other world would have looked like, let alone how vigorously we'd be rationalizing it.