Forget New Hampshire. The earliest bellwether of presidential politics is to be found online, at Cafepress.com.

The Web site – through which inspired individuals design and sell T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, mouse pads, and more – is already teeming with unofficial merchandise for the 2008 presidential campaign. Many well-known figures, including Secretary of State Rice, Senator Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, Senator Obama of Illinois, even the Austrian-born governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, are all to be found on 2008 items.

According to early sales, the current presidential favorites on both sides of the aisle are women: Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Rice.

The products also show off dream team combinations for president and vice president that prospective voters would like to see. Anyone need a “Hillary-Oprah 2008” button? You can snap ’em up in packs of 10 or 100.

What allows political junkies to offer such products is the low-risk system set up at Cafepress.com, a San Francisco-based company founded in 1999 by Maheesh Jain and Fred Durham. Sellers, or “shopkeepers,” set up virtual stores for their merchandise. To create their products, a shopkeeper sends an image and accompanying text, if desired, to Cafepress.com. The design can be placed on more than 70 different products, which the seller selects. When a buyer places an order for an item, Cafepress.com manufactures it on demand and ships it. Cafepress.com then pays the seller, who never has to deal with suppliers or customers at all.

Cafepress.com offers 8 million products each day, but they’re not all political. On the site are items related to pets, popes, and pretty much everything else. “Anything that people are passionate about,” Mr. Jain said – except “adult” content, which is not allowed.

And because the designs can be created quickly, sellers can respond to popular news items overnight.

“It’s so immediate. People put their creativity to work,” Mr. Jain said.

Since 2000, politics has been very much the subject of such passionate, immediate creativity.

“It took off with the recount. People got really emotional,” Mr. Jain said. After the recount concluded, the merchandise took on a bitter “sore loser” tone, which then gave way to another theme.

“When the election got called, there was all the ‘mandate’ merchandise,” Mr. Jain said. “And when we saw the 2008 stuff, we thought, ‘Wow, that’s really ahead of the curve.'”

While at this point sellers are just having fun and making a few bucks on the side, the political products are indeed telling. For one shopkeeper, customer demand led to the creation of his 2008 merchandise.

“We had all the products celebrating President Bush’s victory. Then people started asking, ‘Where is your Condi Rice 2008 stuff?’ “a shopkeeper, who asked to be identified only as “Trent,” said. In response, he created bumper stickers that read “Condi Rice; President 2008” (with a little American flag) on his Web site ProGOPgear.com, which is powered by Cafepress.com. He also made up the exact same design for a veteran Arizona senator, John McCain; the Florida governor, Jeb Bush; the former secretary of state, Colin Powell; the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist; Vice President Cheney; Colorado’s governor, Bill Owens, and Mr. Schwarzenegger.

And yes, he knows that the foreign-born governor is constitutionally barred from the presidency, but Trent made up the stickers anyway.

“People like the celebrity of it,” he said. “He’s larger than life.”

Who would win the Republican nomination for president if the primaries were held today?

“Condi Rice is doing the best. Rudy Giuliani does very well. Rudy is above Arnold,” Trent said. “We thought that John McCain would do better. He did really poorly.”

On the liberal side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama products are the hot sellers. In April, Cafepress.com found that if the election were based on current buying patterns, Mrs. Clinton would win in a landslide.

One of the most striking designs in support of Mrs. Clinton, however, has her running not for president but for vice president. One shopkeeper, Aram Vartian, who is a Web designer by day, is hawking a sophisticated T-shirt design that uses the first initials of the candidates’ last names to look like the logo of a popular television show “The OC.” The $17.99 shirt reads: “The OC 2008; Obama-Clinton; Let’s get our damn country back.”

Even so, Mr. Vartian isn’t betting on an Obama presidency.

“I think it would be the opposite way. But ‘The CO’ didn’t work,” he said.

One far-thinking shopkeeper skipped 2008 altogether and moved straight to the 2012 election. In a burst of liberal confidence, he created a bumper sticker during the 2004 campaign that reads “Clinton-Obama 2012.” It sells for $3.99.

“The thinking was that Kerry would win, and then win another term. I was looking for the best possible scenario,” the seller, Mike Tipping, a student who runs a shop called Democracy 2 from Nova Scotia, said. “I’ve made about $40 off those bumper stickers.”

Supporters of both Republicans and Democrats seem to be having fun with the possibilities for running mates. On the liberal side, there’s a “Dean-Obama 2008″bumper sticker, for conservatives a “Jeb Bush-Condi Rice 2008 ” sticker. And those all-important swing voters might go for the “McCain-Powell ’08” sticker – which also boasts “Honesty, Leadership, Values.”

One matter several sellers agreed on is the ease of using Cafepress.com.

“I tried others that did not have the functionality or the response,” Mr. Varitan said. “It costs me $7 a month to run the shop.”

Aside from the ease of use, Mr. Tipping most appreciated being involved in the election while studying abroad.

“The Internet,” he said, “allowed me to interact with the election – even in Canada.”