GOP presidential race: Ask not for whom the poll tells

Mitt Romney (left) and Ron Paul calculating their odds to win the 2012 Republican nomination. Photograph: Getty Images

The GOP presidential race is entering its home stretch. With the Iowa caucuses on 3 January and the New Hampshire primary on 10 January, little time remains once Christmas and new year are out of the way.

With the first real voting just days away, you might think that opinion polls would be starting to show firm guidance on the likely winner. But you'd be wrong.

Republican voters are no closer to anointing a favourite, either in Iowa or nationally. The opinion polls agree only on one thing: it's an unusually unsettled race.

In Iowa, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have all come and gone as opinion-poll leaders ? not to mention Herman Cain, another Hawkeye State frontrunner before he crashed and burned. But none of them currently sit in first place. That seat now narrowly belongs to Ron Paul.

The latest poll of likely caucus-goers in Iowa, from the American Research Group, has Paul leading by a nose with 21%, followed by Romney with 20% and Gingrich with 19%, in effect a three-way tie, given the poll's 4% margin of error.

That wasn't the case at the same point in the 2008 election cycle, when the average of polls in Iowa showed Mike Huckabee as the most likely winner. ARG's poll at a similar point in December 2007 had Huckabee leading with 28%, compared with John McCain's 20% and Mitt Romney's 17%. The actual Iowa outcome in 2008 was Huckabee winning with 34%, Romney second with 25% and McCain third with 13%

Of course it's easy to validate the 2007-08 opinion polls in hindsight, because we know the result. The national polls in 2007 reveal the dangers of placing any weight on pre-primary polling results: at this point in the electoral cycle, RealClearPolitics's rolling average of national polls had Rudy Giuliani leading Huckabee, Romney and McCain, in that order.

Other than as a finger in the wind, national polls are useless, because presidential primaries revolve around states and, most importantly, the order they vote in. That's why a poll of Iowa or South Carolina is worth far more right now than a nationwide sample. If the national polls had been any guide, the 2008 presidential election was locked up between Giuliani and Hillary Clinton ? right up until the night of the Iowa caucuses.

But even state-level primary polling is unreliable, being vulnerable to sudden, undetected shifts in voters' mood. At this point in 2004, pollsters were almost unanimous in showing that the Democratic Iowa caucus was a showdown between Howard Dean and Dick Gephart. But late surges cost both candidates: the final winner was John Kerry, followed by John Edwards, with Dean and Gephart well back in third and fourth place.

Then again, polling primaries faces special challenges. Primaries attract a far smaller fraction of voters than presidential elections. Fewer than 120,000 Republicans in total attended the 2008 Iowa caucuses, while John McCain got 677,000 votes in Iowa's presidential election that year.

Caucuses are notoriously hard to poll because of the problem of finding "likely voters". Unlike conventional elections, with polling stations open all day, caucuses take place at a specific time and place. If you are working the late shift or can't find a babysitter that night, tough luck. Similarly, a well-organised campaign can cajole lukewarm or new voters to the caucus venues ? as the Obama campaign did in 2008 ? and so upset the pollster's likely-voter samples.

But all is not lost for fans of primary psephology. The Des Moines Register's final Iowa poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, was uncannily accurate in 2008 in predicting the Democratic and Republican finishes, as well as forecasting Kerry's late surge in 2004. So if you want to know where to look, watch the Des Moines Register at the end of the month.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2011/dec/27/iowa-gop-presidential-race-polls

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