July 22 Poll Report

            Good morning everybody.   Cory Booker had a great poll yesterday, a great poll.  Booker, who had been dropping like a rock in these polls, appeared yesterday morning on Face the Nation, and apparently made a very favorable impression on some people.  Early in the morning, while the Face the Nation show was running or would just have run, Booker was actually leading in my poll, which was quite a thing; Booker went in with a Score of 306, Joe Biden a score of 936, so Biden would have been expected to beat Booker three to one.   Booker faded gradually as the day went on, but still wound up with 38% of the vote, which was twice what we would have expected.   This is the summary of yesterday’s poll:

            The relative performances of Biden, Delaney and Hickenlooper, one to another, were almost precisely what we would have expected based on previous polling, so if we left Booker out of this it would be an almost zero-impact poll.  Booker’s tremendous day makes it a relatively high-impact poll.  My predictions for the poll (based on previous polling) were only 62% accurate, which makes this the most surprising poll since the poll of July 3^rd, which was a poll of four candidates in the 1% range.  Since yesterday:

            Cory Booker is up 39 points.

            Tulsi Gabbard is up 15 points due to the removal from the data considered relevant of the June 1^st poll.

            John Delaney and John Hickenlooper are down 8 points each due to yesterday’s poll, and

            Joe Biden is down 35 points due to his underperformance in yesterday’s poll. 

            These are the updated standings:

            And I thought I would close with a note about the Iowa caucuses.  Several readers have suggested that it would be better if I could somehow focus the poll on Iowa voters or Iowa caucus voters.   It would not be better if I were to do this.  What would be much better is if we could get the national pundits to stop paying so much attention to something that really don’t matter very much.  The Iowa caucuses really don’t matter very much.

            The Iowa caucuses hold the attention of political commentators and others who are easily distracted by bright shiney objects because they are the next event on the schedule for a long time.  The political analysts are like sports talk show hosts, who talk almost entirely about what is going to happen next.   This always puzzles me.  They don’t know a damned thing about what is going to happen next, but they talk about it all the time.  Political commentators do the same thing; they get hung up on their thoughts about what will happen next.

            But if you look at the history of the Iowa caucuses, you see that, in general, it doesn’t make any difference who wins them or who does well.  Ronald Reagan lost in Iowa in 1980, and there was no Republican caucus in 1984.  George Bush lost there in 1988, finishing an embarrassing third behind a TV evangelist.  Bill Clinton lost there in 1992, getting only 2.8% of the vote, and there was no Democratic caucus in 1996.  Mike Huckabee won the Republican vote in 2008; John McCain finished fourth.  Trump lost in Iowa in 2016. 

            The only people who win Iowa and win the Presidency, mostly, are the people who are in complete command of the race—and even they may not win.  Hilary Clinton won there in 2016, but the news story coming out of it was that she almost lost; she won 49.8% to 49.6%, in a two-horse race. 

            The Iowa caucuses are very much like that thing that happens in a baseball game, when one team scores three in an inning, the announcers will tell you how important it is for the other team to "answer" in the next inning.  It's nonsense.  It is not that the next inning doesn't count; it just doesn't count any more than any other inning.  Iowa is like that; it isn't that it doesn't count; it just doesn't count any more than any other state.  If you guys want to talk about it, you go ahead, but I don’t think it’s necessary to give it any extra weight.