DAVIS, Calif. — Sue Jones leaves work at 5 p.m. She picks up Benjamin. She cooks dinner. She watches "Curious George" DVDs. Some nights, there are Chutes and Ladders.

When Benjamin heads to bed, she washes dishes, packs lunch and worries about keeping her house. Benjamin, 4, is a preschooler. His mother is 36 and divorced. Her university job pays about $50,000 a year, and her house payments total more than $3,000 a month.

"I worry about how I'm going to stay on top of my mortgage if my salary's not going to go up," Jones said last week. "I'm watching my bank account go down and down. I'm wondering when I need to have a Plan B.

For Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Plan A for winning Tuesday's California primary is to woo voters like Jones, who is a prototype of what polls suggest is a "typical" California Democrat.

The candidates have proposed billions of dollars in federal spending to help average Americans. They've devoted soaring speeches to the promise of revitalizing the middle class. But an analysis of their plans shows little immediate help for Sue Jones or Californians like her.

If Clinton were elected president and immediately delivered everything she has promised, Jones would get a $600 boost in 2009. If Obama delivered everything he promised, he would give Jones at least an extra $1,000 and likely a couple of hundred dollars more, depending on some still-unspecified details. None of those amounts is enough to ease Jones' mortgage fears.

Economic stimulus plans proposed by Clinton and Obama also could give Jones a $250 tax rebate this year. The candidates insist their broader ideas — on job creation, energy independence and strengthening unions, for example — would help the middle class. But the most lucrative benefit the candidates would offer Jones is help with Benjamin's college education more than a dozen years from now. Clinton and Obama would each pick up thousands of dollars of his annual tuition bill.

The candidates' other big-ticket proposals wouldn't help Jones: She makes too much to qualify for an expanded earned income tax credit or an increased minimum wage, and she isn't looking for a hybrid car or helping to take care of her parents.

Republican presidential contenders say their plans to cut taxes and foster business growth also would help middle-class workers. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would lower income tax rates, and he would remove taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for those who earn less than $200,000 a year.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which affects upper-middle-class taxpayers. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee would replace all federal income and payroll taxes with a national consumption tax, which he says would lower the lifetime tax burden of all Americans.

All three Republicans say they would make healthcare more affordable. So do the Democrats: The Obama and Clinton campaigns say their healthcare reform plans would save a middle-class American family up to $2,500 in annual insurance premiums. But those are estimates, based on projected savings from technology, disease prevention and insurance efficiencies. Even if all the proposals come true, the campaigns admit families could wait years to see the full savings.

In any case, Jones' state health-care benefits cost less than one-fifth of the $2,500 a year the average Californian pays in health premiums.

But by nearly every other measure, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California, Jones is a typical California Democrat: a female college graduate (Harvard) who lives on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, calls herself a liberal, opposes the Iraq war and says Americans "have an obligation to look out for each other, and I think the only way we can do that is through the government."

Sue Jones sets her alarm for 6 a.m. Benjamin watches PBS while she gets ready. Then they rush to daycare together and she goes on to the University of California, Davis, where she works in administration for the campus law review.

She is deciding between Obama and Clinton in the primary. Before she makes up her mind, she is reading "It Takes a Village," Clinton's book on modern child rearing, and "Dreams from My Father," Obama's account of his childhood and adult search for identity. "Instead of judging them on the issues," she said, "I keep finding myself judging them on how they're behaving."