Discussion: Poll: Democrats Neck-And-Neck In Iowa

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Discussion for article #245211

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Funny how the urge is always to downplay any advantage Hillary. Hopefully if she wins IA, the “trouble for Hillary” meme will take a vacation.

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Hillary Clinton has a 74% chance of winning the Iowa caucuses.

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These GD polls and the reports on them are as bad as folks that watch the stock market, and talk and worry about their money everyday!

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The Iowa poll was carried out from Jan. 24-26, surveying 426 likely voters with a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.

In udda woids, they’re too close to separate, according to this poll, and yesterday’s poll, which showed Sanders ahead within the MOE.

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I agree with you, Ralph. Nate Silver is the first to say, though, that it’s near impossible to predict primaries, and even more impossible to predict Iowa. That said, he’s pretty confident.

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Their vote-total projection has O’Malley at 5%; IIRC, voters for any candidate who gets under 15% in a given caucus need to move to their second choice; if that’s right, is there anywhere he’s likely to get, say, 20-25%? Has anybody been polling his supporters on their likely fallback?

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It’s a good question, because if the race turns out to be as close as it looks right now, those O’Malley voters could end up swinging the race one way or the other. A while back there were national poll numbers suggesting Sanders would be the second choice of more O’Malley supporters than Hillary would. But it wasn’t all that dramatic, I think it was something like 3:2 (which would only make a difference if it ends up being really close). And that was about a month ago, and not specific to Iowa, so who knows.

There is starting to be a bit of media speculation about the O’Malley factor in Iowa, and I’m kind of surprised that we’re not hearing these kinds of numbers being cited. Hard to believe none of the pollsters have asked O’Malley’s supporters about their second choices in Iowa, given the potential importance of the answer. But I suppose they might simply be finding too few O’Malley supporters in their Iowa surveys to reach any statistically significant conclusions even if they did ask. So it may be that nobody’s actually got those numbers to share.

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This post mistakenly gave the wrong numbers and wrong leader for the Iowa poll. It also gave an incorrect number for Clinton in New Hampshire. We regret the errors.

D’oh!

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They should never have said “We regret the error.” They should have said, “Otherwise, we were on the mark.”

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