by WonkoKevin

There’s a great article by Open Left entitled “Why National Polls Don’t Matter (A History)”.   The author argues convincingly that national polls, pre-Iowa and New Hampshire, mean little compared to the outcomes of the first two races: “On average New Hampshire causes a 33 point swing between the top-two candidates!!!  For example, going into Iowa, Dean was the front runner.  After the results in New Hampshire, he lost 11 points in the National Race while Kerry went up by 37 points.”

Chris Bowers uses the same argument to play out the scenario of how Hillary Clinton can be defeated, despire her current large lead in national polls: “The truth is, for all of Clinton’s national poll advantages, and all the strategizing that many people are engaging in, the path to defeating Hillary Clinton for the nomination is pretty straightforward: defeat her in Iowa and New Hampshire. The simple fact is that any candidate who does better than Clinton in those two states will almost certainly pass her in national polls, and thus probably take the nomination, while any candidate who loses to her in either of those states will almost certainly have no chance at the nomination.”

This has not gone unnoticed by the Obama campaign.

Let’s take a different tact… Let’s look at where national polls were in 2004 for the Democrats.  Data is from PollingReport.com, and numbers given are percentages:

Newsweek 9/18-19
Wesley Clark 14
John Kerry 12
Howard Dean 12
John Edwards 7
Al Sharpton 2
Dennis Kucinich 2
Don’t know 19

CNN/USA Today/Gallup 9/19-21
Wesley Clark 22
Howard Dean 13
John Kerry 11
Dick Gephardt 11
Joe Lieberman 10
John Edwards 4
Carol Moseley Braun 3
Al Sharpton 4
Dennis Kucinich 2
Other/None/No opinion 16

Ipsos-Reid/Cook 9/16-18
Howard Dean 15
Wesley Clark 13
John Kerry 12
Richard Gephardt 9
Joe Lieberman 9
John Edwards 9
Al Sharpton 7
Carol Moseley Braun 1
Other/None/Not sure 21

Three things immediately strike me about this data. First, Dean is not that far ahead and Kerry is not that far behind. It’s a bit of revisionist history to claim that Dean always had a lock on the nomination early. Second, look at the high “Not sure” responses. Third, the field is pretty even, there is no consensus leader, and the leader in each poll is not that far ahead.

Now let’s go to Republicans in 2008:

AP-Ipsos 9/10-12/07
Rudy Giuliani 24
Fred Thompson 19
John McCain 15
Mitt Romney 7
Newt Gingrich 6
Mike Huckabee 5
Sam Brownback 2
None 9
Unsure 13

Gallup, 9/14-16/07
Rudy Giuliani 27
John McCain 18
Fred Thompson 18
Newt Gingrich 11
Mitt Romney 6
Mike Huckabee 3
Ron Paul 3
Duncan Hunter 2
Sam Brownback 1
Tom Tancredo 1
None (vol.)/Unsure 9

While we do have a consensus winner (Giuliani), he is not that far ahead, there are a number of candidates above 5%, and the None/Unsure numbers are high.  Couple this with the fact that Romney actually leads in state polls in 3 of the first 4 states and Thompson is expected to do well in the south and midwest, and we have a wide-open field still, and that’s before we get to Newt Gingrich.  So while the Democratic race is likely to be a 3-person race, the Republicans face a lot more uncertainty, and therefore these national polls have to especially be taken with a grain of salt.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Horse race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.