Waiting on Iowa - Jim Geraghty - National Review Online



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Jim Geraghty

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October 30, 2007 6:30 A.M.

Waiting on Iowa
Can polls be predictive? Sure. Just not yet.

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Venture a guess: What percent of Iowa’s registered voters took part in the 2004 Democratic caucus?

Iowa had about 2.2 million adults eligible to vote that year, and 124,331 participated in the Democratic caucus.

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That means that a mere six percent took part.

As we see poll numbers coming out of Iowa this fall, we ought to keep in mind that the final preferences of those six percent or so on caucus night and the leaders in polls conducted in the closing months of the preceding year tend to be distant relations.

For example, on Halloween 2003, a poll conducted for KCCI TV-8 in Des Moines put Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean tied at 26-percent each. John Kerry was third with 15-percent, followed by John Edwards at 8 percent.

In October 1999, the same poll put George W. Bush 38 percent and Steve Forbes at 17 percent. That seems respectable at first glance, although the final results of those two were much closer, 41 percent to 30 percent. But that poll put Elizabeth Dole in third place at 13 percent, Gary Bauer at 9 percent, and a fifth-place tie between Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes. A lot can change in three months: by January, Dole had dropped out of the race and endorsed Bush, Buchanan had left the GOP, and Keyes managed a respectable third-place finish at 14 percent.

But while we chuckle at past comments from pollsters calling Dean a “juggernaut” we should note that most pollsters’ results do get closer to the final results in the last days of the campaign. For example, the Iowa Poll, released the day before the caucuses in 2004, found that 26-percent of the 606 Iowans they polled were for Kerry, with Edwards at 23-percent, 20-percent for Dean, and 18-percent for Gephardt.

The final results were Kerry at 38-percent, Edwards at 32-percent, Dean at 18-percent, and 11-percent for Gephardt. Even if the percentages were off (by double digits for Kerry and Edwards!) they did manage to get the order right.

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