Thursday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reports:
Dean's state campaign co-chairwoman, Karen Marchioro, the former state Democratic Party chairwoman, said a new Dean campaign poll of Democratic voters shows him 4 percentage points ahead of Kerry here.
So there's another data point for the Washington caucus, lousy though it is.
Contrast this to the Elway poll that kos cites here, where Kerry has a huge lead among the state's Democrats.
But the Elway poll deserves some caveats as well. First, it's a week old. Second, note the caveats Elway himself makes in the article kos links to:
A Jan. 27-29 poll released Wednesday by independent Seattle pollster Stuart Elway found that 40 percent of Democrats supported Kerry, compared with 13 percent for Dean. Elway cautioned that the poll of 205 Democrats did not try to gauge sentiment among the small fraction of the electorate that would attend Saturday's caucuses. But he said it showed how opinion has changed since November, when Dean led in a similar poll in Washington.
So we have a pretty small sample size, and no attempt to determine whether the sample were likely caucus goers.
This may explain why this poll wasn't widely reported, despite the fact that it was released Wednesday.
So in Washington, it comes down to this: the data is lousy. If you, like me, are going to caucus in Washington, be prepared for anything.