What better way to ring in the New Year than to take a look at a couple of brand new polls?
The Des Moines Register has come out with its seminal final poll, and the results were sufficiently jarring to make me spit some of my New Year's mimosa all over my monitor. The DMR has Huckabee at 32%, Romney at 26%, McCain at 13% and Thompson at 9%. Some guy named Giuliani is at 5%. Amazingly, Alan Keyes pulls 1% of the vote, which suggests all sorts of disturbing things about 1% of our fellow citizens.
The results on the Democratic side are also interesting. Obama comes in a solid first with 32%. The heroic Hillary Clinton places second at 25%, while angry populist John Edwards shows third with 24%. Obama's lead is the largest any Democrat has enjoyed in a DMR poll all year.
CNN also has a new poll out, one that shows results more in line with what most other pollsters are getting. On the Republican side, Romney leads Huckabee 32%- 29%, with Thompson leading the second division with a distant 13%. On the Democratic side, it's Clinton 33%, Obama 31% and the angry populist at 22%.
Although the DMR poll is something of an outlier, I would be remiss in my duties as an impartial analyst if I failed to point out that the DMR's final poll in 2004 was highly predictive of what actually happened:
A late surge by Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards has pushed them slightly ahead of long-standing front-runners Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt in the race to win Monday's Iowa caucuses, a new Des Moines Register poll shows.
Kerry, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, leads the Iowa Poll with 26 percent of likely caucus participants naming him their first choice for the presidency. The poll, conducted Tuesday through Friday, also showed him gaining strength as the week wore on.
Their numbers had Kerry at 26%, Edwards at 23%, Dean at 20% and Gephardt at 18%. The actual tally? Kerry 38%, Edwards 32%, Dean 18% and Gephardt 10%. When you factor in the second-choice voters and the undecideds breaking for the guys the DMR said had all the momentum, you can only conclude that the DMR nailed it.
Obviously, the DMR's latest poll doesn't reflect Mike Huckabee's strange day yesterday. And I'm sure Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Mitt Romney staffers are all chanting in a mantra like fashion right now, "It's only one poll."
For what it's worth, the staffers and their new mantra have a point. The polls have been all over the map the past ten days, as we expected they would be given the difficulties in polling over the holiday period. Also, this is the Iowa caucuses we're talking about, where the polls have limited probative value.
In case you care, I'm still clinging to my prediction that Huckabee's support will crater, but there's nothing in the Des Moines Register or CNN polls that provides any support for that notion.
