"Dean-founded group likes Gore as president"

The Hill:

Members of Democracy for America (DFA), a group that evolved from current Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean’s 2004 White House campaign, prefer Al Gore as the Democrats’ 2008 presidential nominee.

According to an ongoing poll, the former vice president and recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize attracts nearly 30 percent of the vote as a write-in candidate. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) is second with 22 percent, followed by former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), both of whom have garnered about 17 percent of the vote.

Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) lags far behind the quartet with 5 percent.

The result of the poll, which closes Nov. 5, has led DFA Executive Director Arshad Hasan to call on Gore to declare if he intends to run.

“Despite the fact that Al Gore has not announced that he will run and wasn’t even included in the endorsement poll, DFA members have seized the power and written him in,” Hasan said in an e-mail to the group’s members.

In the last presidential race, Gore endorsed Dean early in the primary process.