2012 is here. All eyes are on Iowa.
In case your devotion to your political addiction does not extend to a celebratory event like New Year's weekend, what follows is a quick recap of the two major polls that came out of the Hawkeye State, with the clock now ticking down to mere hours before the Iowa caucuses begin on Tuesday evening. That pollsters were in the field during the holiday weekend (PPP polled New Year's Eve and New Year's Day) says a lot about the demand for information about the state of play in Iowa.
On Saturday night, the much-anticipated Selzer/Des Moines Register poll of Iowa caucus-goers was released. The poll, which was one of the few to hit the fairway in the tumultuous caucuses four years ago, gave Mitt Romney a narrow lead (24 percent) over Ron Paul (22 percent).
Despite being in third place (15 percent), the big story of the Selzer/DMR poll was former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Santorum, according to the pollster, was a close second to Romney over the final two days of polling. This seemed to confirm the "Santorum surge" meme that had become conventional wisdom over the past week or so.
Whatever doubt there was in the "Santorum Surge" was eliminated by the final edition of the weekly tracking poll by our polling pals at PPP:
Ron Paul: 20
Mitt Romney: 19
Rick Santorum: 18
Newt Gingrich: 14
Rick Perry: 10
Michele Bachmann: 8
Jon Huntsman: 4
Buddy Roemer: 2
In the greatest tongue-in-cheek admission for a pollster this year, PPP's Tom Jensen tweeted the following invitation:
If you want to take a deep dive here are 340 pgs of crosstabs. If you find out who's going to win in there let me know: LINK
While those volumes and volumes of data don't tell us who is going to win tomorrow night, they do, at a minimum, tell us how the three current frontrunners will attain the victory.
Find out how below the fold.
MITT ROMNEY WINS IF... the sizeable teabagger contingent in Iowa cannot coalesce around a single candidate. To me the most telling statistic in PPP's polling is the numbers among tea party adherents. Mitt Romney is nowhere with the teabaggers: he languishes in fifth place with 12 percent of the vote.
What is saving Mitt's ass at this point, without question, is the fact that the leader among the teabagger set (which, for the moment, is Rick Santorum) has just 23 percent of the teabagger vote. In between Santorum and Romney are three candidates: Newt Gingrich (18 percent), Ron Paul (16 percent), and Michele Bachmann (15 percent).
I explored this exact dynamic yesterday on Sunday Kos. As long as there are multiple anti-Mitts, Romney can keep escaping with 20-30 percent of the vote. He may well do just that tomorrow, unless there is some serious shuffling of the deck in the next 24 hours.
RICK SANTORUM WINS IF... the appearance of momentum creates the reality of a consolidation of the "anti-Mitt" vote. The one unique feature of a caucus is that there is some presentation element to it. If Santorum's validators can convince wavering caucus-goers that the Romney skeptics cannot afford to split their votes in multiple directions, he can win the day. PPP's new tracking poll says that Santorum is now the leading second choice for three of the prominent former anti-Mitt candidates (Perry, Bachmann, and Gingrich).
The beauty for Santorum here is twofold: he won't need much to move to the front, and the recent polling has to be weighing on the minds of the soft-commits for Perry, Bachmann, and Newt. At this point, only the most committed devotees of those three candidates can see a path to victory tomorrow night for their favorite. That may force a bit of pragmatism out of them.
The danger for Santorum? The people who he is relying on to switch don't hate Romney. Romney only has really lousy favorability ratings (33/60) with supporters of Michele Bachmann. Gingrich supporters are actually rather amenable towards Romney (50/44), while Perry supporters are at worst ambivalent (41/46). Those same voters, however, are rather fond of Santorum. He has favorabilities of 60 percent or higher with all three groups.
The only candidate whose supporters truly loathe Mitt Romney (22/69) are Ron Paul's supporters. But while his numbers have diminished a bit, his supporters aren't going anywhere: they don't like Santorum (32/53) much more.
RON PAUL WINS IF... he can get his rather unusual coalition of supporters to close the deal for him. His biggest support comes from young voters, and from Independent voters. The good news for Paul: this is a group that is unlikely to abandon Paul in favor of Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. The bad news for Paul: this is a group that is far from a lock to participate in the caucuses. In short, these are the unlikely voters.
According to PPP, over a third of those who say they are participating in the 2012 Republican caucuses did not participate in 2008, with competitive primaries on both sides. Sure, it is possible that Paul's quirks might inspire previously unattainable voters to join the process. But there is at least some cause for skepticism.
There's also a slight chance that Paul's flirtation with the front of the field did not wear well with Iowa voters. The Selzer/DMR poll said that Paul had 22 percent of the vote, but only 18 percent of the vote over the last two days. That means he slid roughly eight points from the beginning of the poll to the end of the poll. Furthermore, PPP found that Paul's favorabilities had lapsed into net negative territory this week.
SOMEONE ELSE WINS IF... all of them drop out and endorse the one remaining also-ran. Seriously, that's what it would probably take. At this point, it is hard to cobble together a realistic scenario where the winner of the Iowa caucuses is not named Romney, Paul, or Santorum. With no absentee ballots or early voting, the Gingrich boomlet is meaningless, and Perry and Bachmann have been dead candidate campaigning for weeks now.
The question is, at long last, whether Iowa and New Hampshire will mean anything after all. The "winner" of the caucuses, if PPP is right, will essentially be inching out in front of a three-way tie. That, plus the fact that New Hampshire is something of a foregone conclusion because of Romney's quasi-homeboy status, means that we may very well still be up in the air ten days from now.