Thursday, January 3, 2008

Iowa: Clearing My In-Box

I have to admit I experienced a bit of Iowa Caucus overload yesterday, and as I'm not in Des Moines with every political reporter in the Western World, I went off the grid for a bit and spent much of the day yesterday with family. As such, my mental "in-box" has filled to overflow with thoughts about what the last round of polls are telling about the Iowa Caucuses. What follows is an attempt to sum up and empty the in-box:

1) We Have No Idea Who Will Win. Yes, despite tens of thousand of interviews, polls of every shape, size and method and our own fancy charts featuring regression-derived trend lines of varying degrees of sensitivity, the only thing we can say with confidence is that the Democratic and Republican races are close. It is hard to know much more than that given the small margins and, more importantly, the huge variations in the kinds of likely caucus goers sampled.
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