The most dramatic result to come out of the poll, which is based on telephone interviews with 1,408 registered Iowa voters on Dec. 5 and 6, is Huckabee’s emergence from the shadows of the GOP race into the front runner’s spot in just two months. The ordained Southern Baptist minister now leads Romney by a two-to-one margin, 39 percent to 17 percent, among likely GOP caucus-goers. In the last NEWSWEEK survey, conducted Sept. 26-27, Huckabee polled a mere 6 percent to Romney’s 25 percent, which then led the field.
An outlier? Possibly — no other poll has shown results like these. But it’s also possible that things are moving quickly in Iowa, and that the trend remains all Huckabee all the time.
This poll was taken just before and just after the speech. But I continue to be dubious that the speech is going to have much of an effect in Iowa.
The survey was completed on the day of the former Massachusetts governor’s much-heralded speech in College Station, Texas, addressing his religion, though most respondents probably had not heard it. Still, only a small number of the 540 Republican voters surveyed in Iowa (10 percent) said they wanted to hear more from Romney about that issue, and close to half (46 percent) said at least some Iowa Republican voters will not consider supporting Romney because of his Mormon faith. More than a quarter (27 percent) said they don’t consider Mormons to be Christians, and one in six (16 percent) said they are less likely to support Romney because he is a Mormon.
Here’s another interesting tidbit. Everyone knows that in 2004 it looked for a long time like Howard Dean was way ahead, but then John Kerry won the Iowa caucuses and eventually the nomination. I was wondering about the money differential, though — has anyone ever pulled off what it’s starting to look like Huckabee might pull off while having basically no money?
Not in 2004, anyway. At the end of 2003 (19 days before the 2003 Iowa caucuses), Dean had a bit over $9.5 million cash on hand, having raised almost $16 million in the fourth quarter. Kerry was behind, but still doing all right: he had $1.6 million on hand, having raised $5.2 million that quarter and spent over $11 million.
Compare that to Romney/Huckabee. In the third quarter of 2007 (July-Sept, the most recent available): Huckabee raised just over $1 million, and had only $650,000 on hand, having spent a paltry $800,000. Romney raised nearly ten times that — $9.5 million — plus of course he’s made a couple of hefty personal loans to his campaign, most recently for over $8 million. His cash on hand was listed as $9.2 million, but it’s effectively infinite, and he spent an astounding $21 million in the third quarter. Huckabee’s fundraising has picked up since the end of September (he apparently raised a million bucks online in October), but he’s not remotely in Romney’s league money-wise. Nor is he anywhere near where John Kerry was at this time in 2003.
Yet he’s winning in Iowa, and, according to Newsweek, by a lot. It’s a truly remarkable story, and if he wins Iowa, it will go down as one of the great upsets in American political history.
I called it here.
Sorry, I just couldn’t help noticing that Newsweek choses to introduce the story as follows:
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p>Emphasis added.
Huckabee has about as much chance as being nominated as Dennis Kucinich.
It’s about winning Iowa, thereby derailing Romney, and handing the nomination to Giuliani. Scenario here.
Giuliani isn’t out of it, but if Huckabee wins in Iowa, he’s going to be tough to beat. He’ll probably win SC too and could use his Iowa momentum to do above expectations in NH… and knowing the media, even if Huckabee loses handily in NH, if he does okay, it’ll be all about how he did so swell in NH, and not about whoever actually won it.
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p>The media’s really picked up on Huckabee, likes the story and is going to run with it, to the detriment of us all (who needs serious journalism, investigating the man, when we can just have fluffy pieces that may as well be written by the Huckabee campaign?).
First of all, the Dean campaign in Iowa squandered huge amounts of money in stupid ways, so it may be that Kerry actually effectively spent more (in contrast to New Hampshire, where the Dean campaign made very effective use of money; those two states were effectively separate organizations).
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p>Secondly, polls in Iowa are horrible. It’s extremely hard to poll for a caucus:
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p>1. Low turnout, and it’s hard to predict who will turn out
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p>2. People actually talk at a caucus. They listen to speeches, hand out campaign literature, try to convince others to join them, etc. This means that even if a poll were to be able to focus in on the actual caucusgoers, it would also need to do a good job of portraying who’s committed and who’s persuadable and which way undecided people might lean… and a lot of it depends on how good the precinct captains at that caucus are going to be.
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p>3. non-viable groups: where will they go? people’s second choice matters. Also things like the Kucinich-Edwards deal in 2004, which boosted Edwards in places where there were fewer than 15% Kucinich supporters.
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p>The biggest part of Dean’s “loss” in Iowa was based on the fact that he was expected to win, an expectation that would’ve sounded quite far-fetched and ridiculous to most people 6 months. If pre-September expectations were still in place, a 3rd place finish for Dean, above Gephardt, would’ve been considered strong and given him momentum. So the fact that polls in Iowa showed Dean with a strong lead was in fact one of the big causes of his loss.
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p>Now it turns out that in state after state, Dean very consistently won among voters who had made up their minds early. It was among voters who remained undecided until the last few weeks that Dean lost. Think about what that sort of pattern does to polls.
Huckabee became relevant only a few weeks ago. Times, Journal, Post editors assign reporters to put together “hard look” stories. Takes a little while to write. Those should start hitting the papers this week and next, which in turn drives the TV coverage.
and it’s already started with Huckabee’s odd penchant for releasing criminals. More here. Who knew there would be so much material to work with?
Lucky Hucky may well come in a strong second, but he won’t win. Dean was still climbing at this point in 2004 (he was still a coupla weeks away from the endorsements of Gore and Harkin).
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p>Ten days out, everyone had counted Kerry out of Iowa. And who’s the guy right now where Huck was a month ago? My guess is McCain.
It’s a small sample size (only ~250), but that small number put the running average trend for Huckabee over Romney: see http://www.pollster.com/08-IA-… and http://www.pollster.com/IATopz…