Steve Benen is incorrect about David Yepsen predicting Kerry's surge in the Iowa 2004 caucus. This is what Yepsen predicted the day of the Iowa caucus: He predicted that Dean would win!
If organization is as important as caucus lore tells us it is, Howard Dean should win the Iowa caucuses tonight. Driven by youthful energy and anti-war activism not seen since the Vietnam War, Dean has assembled what his organizers claim is the best get-out-the-vote operation ever built in the state.
They are probably correct. As the campaign draws to a close today, the important story isn't the candidates and their hoopla. It's their organizations and their boring grunt work on the streets and telephones of Iowa.
Given that recent polls of the race show the contest has tightened, Dean hopes his operation provides him with the political firewall he needs to protect himself against the late surges by John Kerry and John Edwards. A Dean win in Iowa tonight would be devastating to the early front-runner here, Dick Gephardt.
So regarding the status of Edwards, I wouldn't listen to either the "dean" of the Iowa press, or the Obama's camp spin, for that matter:
Methinks they doth protest too much. Indeed, the fact that Plouffe and Fischer are posturing this way suggests that the Obama forces continue to fear the prospect of being trumped by Edwards in Iowa. And with good reason. So far Obama has spent some $5 million on advertising in the state, and Clinton's total is more than $3 million, whereas as of two weeks ago, Edwards had spent just $20,000. And yet the race remains a statistical three-way dead heat.
More to the point, because of the bizarro nature of the caucuses--the participants must go out, on a frigid night, for a multi-hour ordeal of public declarations of support and multiple rounds of voting--the contest in Iowa is a slog-it-out ground war, in which organization and get-out-the-vote efforts are paramount. And here all sides concede privately that Edwards's team, which has been in place essentially for five years, is the class of the field. When I ask Edwards if he's concerned about signs of slippage in Iowa, he literally laughs in my face. "We have 99 county chairs and about 75 percent of the precincts covered with precinct chairs," he says. "I know how to run a caucus campaign in Iowa--and so do the people who work for me."
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