The new University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll (pdf) out this morning has some intriguing results on both sides. But first a note about the poll's methodology. It's important to note that the question asked of respondents was open-ended:
If your caucus was today, who would you support for president in your caucus? Just tell me the name.
Which leads Mark Blumenthal at Pollster to issue the following warning:
We have not included the previous Hawkeye polls in our Iowa chart because of the use of the open-ended question. This is not a statement about the quality of the survey. As I wrote back in August:
This [open-ended question] undoubtedly provides a tougher test of voter commitment, but also produces a much bigger undecided and renders the results incomparable to other Iowa polls.
With that in mind, the results are as follows:
The Democrats (306 LVs, Oct. 17-24, MOE 5.5%):
| Candidate | October | August | RCP 5-poll Ave. |
| Clinton | 28.9 | 24.8 | 28.8 |
| Obama | 26.6 | 19.3 | 23.6 |
| Edwards | 20 | 26 | 21.2 |
| Richardson | 7.2 | 9.4 | 8.8 |
| Biden | 5.3 | - | - |
| Don't Know | 8.9 | 14.4 | - |
This has got to be a painful result for Edwards, coming on the heels of the news that he's just finished visiting all 99 counties in Iowa vs. 59 for Obama and 39 for Clinton. Contrary to popular belief about Iowa politics, if the most recent polls are right, it would appear that there is an inverse correlation between number of towns visited and how well the candidates are polling, and it just may be an indication to Edwards that it's time to start advertising before an "Edwards falling" storyline takes hold. But there is some good news for Edwards: perhaps the more important statistic, the likelihood of attendance at the Jan. 3 caucus.
On the bright side is that the people who do support Edwards have a history of showing up when it counts. Nearly 76% of Edwards' poll supporters attended the 2004 caucus, while 58% of Clinton's and 55% of Obama's supporters made the trip four years ago. "If we only look at caucus-goers who are almost certain to attend, we find that Edwards makes up the gap with Obama and Clinton, and moves clearly ahead," said David Redlawsk, the poll's director and an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa.
The Republicans: (285 RVs, Oct. 17-24, MOE 5.8%):
| Candidate | October | August | RCP 4-poll Ave. |
| Romney | 36.2 | 27.8 | 26.3 |
| Giuliani | 13.1 | 11.7 | 13.3 |
| Huckabee | 12.8 | 1.8 | 13.8 |
| Thompson | 11.4 | 7.6 | 15 |
| McCain | 6 | 3.1 | 7 |
| Don't Know | 14.9 | 27.4 | - |
The story here is Huckabee who's increased his share of the vote by 11 points in almost 2 months. His tie for second place tracks with other polling in the state and indeed, looking at the internals, it's clear that his growing strength comes from the born again/evangelical crowd. While Romney gets 29% of that vote, Huckabee is close behind with 21%. But it's the non-evangelical vote that the candidates will need to work on if they hope to eat away at Romney's support: he leads this voting block with 41% of the vote, more than 3x anyone else.
Romney's impressive increase in support since August should not go unnoticed, however. Conventional wisdom was that his support was beginning to plateau and Giuliani was starting to close the gap. Clearly, such a trend is not evident here. At the same time, Romney polls so far above his average that it could be an outlier, we'll have to wait for more polling out of the state to confirm if in fact he's surging going into the final 2 months.
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