The battle for Iowa
Posted: Wednesday, January 02, 2008 9:25 AM by Domenico Montanaro
The day after the Des Moines Register poll came out, there's been a ton of reverb on exactly what the numbers mean. The Washington Post looks at Obama's strength among indies in the survey. And here's a good reminder from four years ago: "Only a small portion of Iowa’s approximately 600,000 registered Democrats have historically shown up on caucus night. Four years ago, about 125,000 voters participated in Iowa's Democratic caucuses; 19 percent called themselves independents. But from the outset of this campaign, Obama's campaign has targeted independents as intensively as it has registered Democrats, bombarding them with phone calls, direct-mail pieces and personal visits."
Des Moines Register does a story on how all of the campaigns are expressing doubt over the turnout model in the poll. “Democratic pollsters and strategists agree that more independent voters nationally have supported Democrats than Republicans in the past two years. Likewise, they are seeing rising numbers of Iowa's unaffiliated voters show up as supporters of Democratic candidates for Thursday's caucuses. ‘I'm sure it will be higher, but that just seems impossible,’ Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster working for Delaware Sen. Joe Biden's campaign, said about the Register poll's independent figure. ‘That would be a revolution.’”
The New York Times recaps yesterday’s happenings in Iowa, including Romney vs. Huckabee, reactions to the Des Moines Register poll, Kucinich urging his supporters to back Obama if the congressman doesn’t make threshold, Edwards’ 36-hour marathon, and Huck’s upcoming appearance on Leno.
We're guessing many of you have noticed a certain red-haired New York Times columnist on the trail. Well, here's her first Iowa column. "Has Hillary truly changed, and grown from her mistakes? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask her off-putting and self-sabotaging qualities better? If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom?”
More from MoDo: "Oddly, Barack and Michelle Obama also radiate a sense that they are owed. Not for a lifetime of sublimation and humiliation, but for this onerous campaign, for offering themselves up to save and uplift the nation, even though it disrupted their comfortable lives… So it comes down to this: Will Queen Hillary reign? Will Prince Barack deign? And who is owed more?"
The Register calls Kucinich’s second-choice backing of Obama “a symbolic gesture.” “In 2004, Kucinich ran for president and waged a more aggressive Iowa campaign. In that campaign, the Ohio congressman made a deal with supporters of John Edwards that whichever candidate did not meet the 15-percent viability threshold in an individual caucus would throw his support to the other.”
The New York Times front-pages how some Iowans are actually excluded from the caucus process. “Because the caucuses, held in the early evening, do not allow absentee voting, they tend to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have baby sitters, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, and many others who work in retail, at gas stations and in other jobs that require evening duty.”
