{"id":40802236053,"date":"2012-01-04T15:20:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T20:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/2012\/01\/04\/christie-er-romney-wins-iowa\/"},"modified":"2021-01-25T11:22:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T16:22:05","slug":"christie-er-romney-wins-iowa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/2012\/01\/04\/christie-er-romney-wins-iowa\/","title":{"rendered":"Christie, er, Romney Wins Iowa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sure, it was only by 8 votes.\u00a0 And the vote count probably wasn\u2019t accurate.\u00a0 And it has no bearing on the actual number of Iowa delegates he will get.\u00a0 But Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucuses.\u00a0 Just a few weeks ago, this seemed highly improbable.<\/p>\n

So what happened?\u00a0 A stealth organizing campaign and oodles of PAC spending on TV ads tearing down his opponents certainly played the major role.\u00a0 But the on-the-ground presence of New Jersey\u2019s governor in the final days before the vote will certainly be seen as a factor \u2013 certainly by Chris Christie\u2019s supporters.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to say whether many actual caucus goers were swayed by Christie\u2019s campaign appearances.\u00a0 But he went there.\u00a0 He got good press.\u00a0 And Romney won.\u00a0 Favor owed.\u00a0 That\u2019s good for Christie and good for New Jersey.<\/p>\n

In the end, Romney did a couple points better than the 23% he was averaging in the final pre-election polls leading up to the vote.\u00a0 This was just 2 points shy of the 27% win I predicted<\/a> for him two weeks ago.<\/p>\n

All the other candidates, but one, performed about a point or two below their pre-election poll numbers.\u00a0 The exception was Rick Santorum, who finished more than 8 percentage points above his final pre-election average of 16%<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Basically, each of the other candidates lost a little support to Santorum in the final days and he and Romney split the remaining undecided vote.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth noting that Santorum did not hit double digits in any poll until fifteen days before the caucus.\u00a0 He was steadily gaining support at the rate of a couple points a day in the final week.\u00a0 The last poll interviews were conducted on January 1.\u00a0 If polling had continued up to the caucus itself, he could have conceivably ended with a 23% showing in pre-election polls.<\/p>\n

So the polls were not off the mark.\u00a0 The major bone of contention over the pre-election polls was whether Ron Paul\u2019s support was being accurately represented.\u00a0 Many pundits noted that his firmly committed supporters were younger, and thus less likely to be included in a standard landline telephone survey.\u00a0 I argued the opposite, that while they may be committed, the polls had too many independents in their sample and were thus over-representing the number of Paul supporters who would actually show up at a caucus.<\/p>\n

In the end, it was neither.\u00a0 The final poll average for Paul was 21.5%.\u00a0 He got 21.4% of the vote.\u00a0 He won the independent vote with 43%.\u00a0 This was lower than some polls had shown him doing among this group.\u00a0 While 23% of caucus goers identifying themselves as politically independent was higher than the 13% who did so in 2008, it was also lower than some pundits had predicted.\u00a0 In the end, the polling on Paul\u2019s support was pretty much on target.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Iowa GOP voters who said the most important candidate quality was being a \u201ctrue conservative\u201d split their vote between the libertarian Paul (37%) and the socially conservative Santorum (36%).\u00a0 This underlines a key issue in polling on political ideology \u2013 the meaning of these terms are in the eye of the beholder.<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney used his Iowa victory speech to congratulate Santorum and Paul on their showings and on their campaigns in general. \u00a0He made it clear that he wants GOP voters to see this as a 3-way race.\u00a0 If you put his remarks through the politi-speak translator, his message for voters in upcoming primary states is: \u201cYour only choices to take on President Obama now are the far right wingnut, the libertarian wacko, or me!\u201d<\/p>\n

And that brings us back to Chris \u201cI\u2019m tired of dealing with the crazies<\/a>\u201d Christie.\u00a0 Yes, he had a big night in Iowa.\u00a0 But he has a lot of work ahead of him campaigning for Romney in other states where his Jersey charisma may hold some sway.\u00a0 That\u2019s probably not in the South, by the way.<\/p>\n

P.S. One disappointing result for those of us who enjoy the spectator sport of all this was Michele Bachmann\u2019s withdrawal after getting just 5% of the vote.\u00a0 She barely exceeded the 4,800 votes she garnered at the Ames corndog straw poll spectacle in August.\u00a0 I had predicted (hoped?) she would get her ground game in action and squeak out a narrow 3rd<\/sup> place finish. Boy, was I wrong! \u00a0[And it also demonstrates how extraordinarily fluid this race has been]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sure, it was only by 8 votes.\u00a0 And the vote count probably wasn\u2019t accurate.\u00a0 And it has no bearing on the actual number of Iowa delegates he will get.\u00a0 But Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucuses.\u00a0 Just a few weeks ago, this seemed highly improbable. So what happened?\u00a0 A stealth organizing campaign and oodles of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":939,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40802236053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/939"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40802236053"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40802244240,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236053\/revisions\/40802244240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40802236053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40802236053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40802236053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}