A political lifetime ago (this past Sunday), Ron Paul took the lead in a PPP poll that media outlets are being forced to contend with (they have an outdated aversion to automated polls and often downplay them, while acknowledging that PPP, at least, seems to be accurate).
Today a media poll (the KCRG/Gazette/ISU Poll) will get a lot of attention confirming what PPP saw, in part because it's a media poll.
Just two weeks before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses there’s a new leader, but the race remains “remarkably fluid,” according to a new Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG poll likely Republican caucus-goers.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul has moved into first place – the fifth candidate to hold that spot since the mid-August Iowa GOP Straw Poll. The data collected between Dec. 8 and 18 suggest that unlike the previous frontrunners, Paul’s support is more solid.
I have been referencing back to this post (
Five things you should know about the state of the GOP race) because little has changed since early December. Here's more data from the latest poll confirming a fluid race, with Paul having some advantages:
While Paul’s lead is easily within the margin of error, James McCormick, professor and chair of political science at Iowa State and coordinator of the poll, says the polling found that 51 percent of those naming the libertarian-leaning Texan as their first choice are “definitely” backing him.
The percentage for the next two candidates is much weaker, at 16.1 percent for Romney and 15.2 for Gingrich, McCormick said.
“Moreover, the percentage of respondents ‘leaning to’ or ‘still undecided’ in their support for these latter two candidates remains high, at 58 percent for Gingrich and 38 percent for Romney,” he said. “In other words, I'm going to make the case that these numbers are still very soft for those two candidates.”
That leaves Paul in a strong Iowa position (as we all await the next Ann Selzer poll out in early January for confirmation).
As for the bigger picture, the Washington Post makes the same point we have been making about Paul's legitimacy and threat:
Perhaps most fearsome to Republican leaders is Paul’s refusal to rule out a third-party presidential bid that would steal votes from the Republican nominee and make President Obama’s path to reelection considerably easier.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, for instance, indicates that Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would be locked in a dead heat in a one-on-one contest. But in a three-way race with Paul, Obama would hold a wide advantage. The survey also suggests that Paul on his own would pose at least as much danger to Obama as Gingrich would.
There's no way to know what Paul will do, but it's unlikely he's just going to fade away, like so many of the other GOP pretenders have.
It just takes a media poll saying so to get the media to say the same thing.