Spin patrol
Good Wednesday noon, Fellow Seekers,
Watching the analysis of last night’s stunner on the Dem side of the New Hampshire primary, what I most wanted was to hear one of the bigfoot pundits say: “We were all wrong. We didn’t see this coming. The polls misled us. We don’t know why it happened and we […]

The latest poll of likely New Hampshire primary voters, published this morning by the Concord (N.H.) Monitor has it Barack Obama 32, Hillary Clinton 31, John Edwards 18, Bill Richardson 8, everyone else less than 5 percent.
If you look at the list of the last 10 or 20 polls taken in New Hampshire, as compiled […]

A Newsweek poll out Friday afternoon had the GOP race among likely Iowa caucus goers:

Mike Huckabee: 39 percent
Mitt Romney: 17
Fred Thompson: 10
Rudy Giuliani: 9
Ron Paul: 8
John McCain: 6

If this is right, it’s mighty impressive. This poll had a large sample, was taken Wednesday and Thursday by the most tried and trusted methodology (human telephone interviews) […]

MSNBC’s “First Read” has bare bones of new poll numbers out of Iowa. Details of the poll, by Strategic Vision (a firm that polls mostly for Republican clients) are due out tonight, but here are the top numbers:
On the Dem. side:
Clinton: 29%
Obama: 29%
Edwards: 23%.
On the Repub. side:
Romney: 26%
Huckabee: 24%
Giuliani: 14%
Thompson: 10%
McCain: 7%.
The thing that impresses […]

From the Times writeup of the new poll:
“Iowa polls this early are notoriously unreliable in terms of predicting the outcome; that said, this poll suggested volatility on the Republican side, with evidence that Mr. Huckabee is well-positioned to present an intense last-minute challenge to Mr. Romney, who has worked for a year to assure himself […]

I was about to write “we’re entering the make or break period in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.” But let’s stay calm and keep repeating some of the reasons Black Ink calls poll stories Crack for Political Junkies: “Caucus support is very hard to measure. The whole situation in Iowa changed in the […]

Good Thursday noon, Fellow Seekers,
The John Edwards presidential campaign is up today with its first TV ad in Iowa. It’s a likable 60-second spot, without much substance, in which former Sen. Edwards tell people not to look to him as a hero (was there such a great danger of that?) but to look to ordinary […]

Survey USA sampled 540 registered votes in Minnesota Oct. 12-14 about presidential preferences. Working for three Minn. TV stations (KSTP was the Twin Cities partner), Survey USA ran trial heats of Sen. Hillary Clinton against six Republican candidates, including all the frontrunners. Clinton won every matchup by substantial margins. The margin of error of +/- […]

Good Monday noon, 
The first Star Tribune poll since the paper forced out long-time Minnesota Poll director, Rob Daves, is full of bad news for the three major U.S. Senate candidates.
Norm Coleman’s approval rating (45%) is at a level (anything below 50 is considered this level) that paints a big V for vulnerable on the chest of any […]

Fact #1:Everything about the mood of the country (we want change!), the partisan identification trends (Dems, 50- Repubs, 35), and the issue environment (for example, he said, polls show a spike in concern about rising levels of economic inequality) favors the idea that 2008 should be a very good year to run for office as a Democrat,says pollster […]

Has the near-demise of the John McCain presidential bid ended Tim Pawlenty’s chance of being on the GOP ticket in 2008?
No, says Larry Jacobs, because that chance was always “remote and bordering on delusional.”
This caught me off guard. My buddy Jacobs, director of the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, is […]