January 19, 2004

Iowa Death Trip: Fresh Crack From the Hawkeye State!

The last dime bag of Zogby tracking poll numbers from Iowa has arrived, and they show Kerry up 3 points on Dean, 4 on Edwards, 7 on Gephardt.

They don't mean a thing, but there they are. For all the press's attention to the quaintness of the caucus system, journalists mostly fail to recognize--as Gisleson pointed out here last week--both how difficult and capricious it is to gauge likely turnout for these things, and how volatile the swings in allegiance at the evening-long horse-trading sessions tend to be. 

Purely on instinct, I see three plausible outcomes. I'll list them from most likely to least likely:

1) Dean wins, and by a margin (say, 5+ points) that comes as a bit of a surprise after the battering he's taken there.

2) Edwards edges Dean, and both finish substantially ahead of Kerry and Gephardt.

3) Kerry edges Edwards, pushing Dean into third with distinctly underwhelming numbers.

Really, though, I'll be more than a little surprised if Kerry wins. The machine Democrats in Iowa have already watched him flop as the anointed front-runner once before, a year ago.  

NOTE: If you arrived via a Counterpunch link, press here to go to the Bush Wars homepage and view other Iowa-related posts. 

Posted by Steve Perry at January 19, 2004 09:01 AM

« January 18, 2004 | Main | January 20, 2004 »