While the nation watches who's ahead in the Democratic race, Marc Cowlin is keeping an eye on which candidate is ahead in online sales of boxer shorts and T-shirts.

Cowlin is a spokesman for CafePress.com, one of the many online companies selling campaign garb. (For the record, Hillary Rodham Clinton is leading in sales of men's boxer shorts at CafePress, while Barack Obama has the lead in thong sales.)

With slogans like "Barack the Vote," "A Woman's Place is in the White House" and "The Mac is Back," online stores like CafePress have seen steady sales of campaign-related merchandise, mostly from the young people they cater to.

And with each passing primary, the sales of campaign clothing have changed to reflect a candidate's popularity _ or lack thereof.

"I think (young people's) attention spans are pretty short," said David Beitzel, 26, a student at Harrisburg Area Community College in Harrisburg, Pa. His vote is for Obama, but he isn't sure who he thinks has the most eye-catching stuff.

"Each side has made its case and now they're just repeating it. How is humor affecting politics? I'm waiting to see how nasty it gets," he said.

CafePress allows users to design T-shirts and other items like baby bibs. About 20 percent of its sales come from campaign merchandise, Cowlin said.

Embracing the interactivity of modern media, CafePress lets customers submit designs for everything from shirts to hats to underwear. It has received more than 1.2 million designs for Obama products, while those for Clinton and John McCain combined barely break 1 million.

"We started seeing people uploading designs for the campaign long before the candidates were even decided," Cowlin said. "We started to notice most of the major traffic and interest right before the primaries." Even before the analysts, "We knew who the front-runners were going to be."

Some sites selling political garb often can tell which way the wind is blowing for an entire political party. Two sites, TheDonkeyShirts.com for Democrats and TheElephantShirts.com for Republicans, launched simultaneously in January and saw a response almost instantly.

William Rhamey is electronic marketing director for Powertex Group, which runs both sites. "Since we're doing both sides of the political spectrum, the donkey store seems to sell a lot more, but the elephant store gets a lot more feedback. We get a lot of negative e-mails about it," he said.

Other companies have seen similar ups and downs in their sales for particular candidates. At BarelyPolitical.com, the same team that brought the now-famous "Obama Girl," founder Ben Relles stopped selling T-shirts with likely Republican nominee McCain on them.

"People weren't buying it," Relles said.

McCain has sometimes been criticized for not courting young voters, but Clinton and Obama, who have a larger youth base, have seen their merchandise fluctuate as the race winds on.

"The Obama stuff picks up when he does really well. After big wins or big events we start to see more sales," Relles said. "People pick the candidates based on who's leading in the polls."

That seems to be the case on some college campuses.

"People think it's cool to be a Democrat or to vote for Obama," said Stacie Barton, 22, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "A lot of my (classmates) who don't pay attention to politics just stick with whoever is popular. The people who are not political just ask, 'Who are you voting for and why? All right. That's my guy.'" Continued...