There’s a new example available of how different polls of the same category of voters on the same day and in the same place produce strikingly different results. Yesterday both CNN and Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research released polls of likely voters in the Florida GOP presidential primary, conducted over the same two-day period (November 25-26).
According to CNN, Rudy Giuliani has a huge lead in the Sunshine State, polling at 38%, with Mitt Romney at 17%, McCain and Thompson at 11%, and Mike Huckabee running fifth at 9%. According to Insider Advantage (per the Southern Political Report), the big story is that Huckabee’s “surge” isn’t limited to Iowa: he’s running second in FL at 17%, trailing Rudy at 26%, but leading McCain at 13%, Romney at 12% and Thompson at 9%.
The CNN poll has a margin of error of 5.5%, while Insider Advantage’s MoE is 3.5%. But somebody’s just getting it wrong.
BTW, the CNN/Insider Advantage Sunshine Competition continues tonight, as the former sponsors the YouTube GOP presidential debate from St. Petersberg at 8:00 EST, and the latter conducts a snap poll of Florida Republicans on “who won.”

E.J. Dionne writes in his Washington Post column today that the landslike victory last weekend of the Australian Labor Party under Kevin Rudd’s leadership provides important lessons for Democrats in the U.S.:

Rudd’s balancing act provides a model for center-left parties that also points to the tensions they confront once in power. Rudd won as a self-described “economic conservative” who would tightly manage the nation’s budget. But he also won thanks to an activated trade union movement fighting for its life in seeking to overthrow Howard’s workplace rules….
Rudd relied on youth, moderation and the voters’ exhaustion with the ideological categories of the past. But he also needed the passion of activists determined to end a long conservative era. Sound familiar?

As Garance Franke-Ruta has pointed out, Ryan Lizza has an Obama campaign update in the latest issue of The New Yorker which includes a fascinating nugget about its focus on “microtargeting” analysis of the Iowa Caucus-going electorate:

[A] thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., an array of forty-eight computer processors were mining census demographics, consumer-marketing data, and Iowa-state voter files to form one of the most sophisticated and data-rich portraits of an electorate ever created. This is the work of Ken Strasma, who is among the Democratic Party’s most admired numbers gurus. After being pursued by all the major candidates, Strasma, who helped Kerry to win Iowa in 2004, decided to commit his firm, Strategic Telemetry, to Obama.

….

When the demographic DNA is combined with polling and interviews with Iowa voters, Strasma is able to create the political equivalent of a FICO score—the number that creditors use to determine whether a consumer is a good bet to repay a loan. Strasma’s score tells the campaign of the likelihood that a specific Iowan will support Obama.

Iowa, of course, is about getting supporters to show up and stay half the night at precinct Caucuses, as much or more than identifying such voters to begin with. And the section of Lizza’s piece about Obama’s precinct training centers on plans to deploy chocolate chip cookies to deter hungry Caucus-goers from heading off to a drive-thru before the final vote is taken.
Maybe the “demographic DNA” being assembled by Obama’s numbers wizards in Washington can tell precinct captains in Iowa what kind of munchies would work best with each committed and undecided voter.

CNN has a useful story buried on its web page about presidential candidate expeditures on television ads. It’s pretty much a matter of Mitt Romney and then everyone else. Romney has spent over 8 .million smackers on TV so far; the next leading TV spender on the GOP side is John McCain, at a paltry $300,000.
Among Democrats, Obama leads in TV expenditures with $3.9 milliion, trailed by both Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson (who “went up” very early) at $2.2 million.
But three candidates are about to go airborne in a big way: Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards and Ron Paul. Get ready for saturation ads, Iowa and New Hampshire.

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics methodically goes through the aspects of the Iowa Caucus system that show the unreliability of polling in advance of the event, particularly with respect to the tight three-way Democratic race.
It’s probably a good thing to read and think about before the next batch of Iowa polls, particularly since one’s coming out tonight that apparently shows the Big Three Dems in Iowa within three points of each other.

While the Kentucky governor’s race and the Democratic takover of the Virginia Senate were the top-line news from yesterday’s offyear elections, other results were of interest as well.
As expected, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour was re-elected over Democrat John Arthur Eaves, but Democrats did take back numerical control of the state Senate (not the same as organizational control, since some Democrats have caucused with Republicans in the past).
In New Jersey, there were no major changes in the composition of the Democratic-controlled legislature. But the big surprise is that a stem cell research funding ballot initiative strongly backed by Gov. Jon Corzine was narrowly defeated, with fiscal rather than moral concerns apparently driving the results.
In Utah, the big news was the overwhelming defeat by voters of a school voucher plan enacted earlier by the Republican-controlled state legislature. And Democrat Ralph Becker was elected mayor of Salt Lake City by a landslide.
And in the least surprising news, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was easily re-elected.

Democrat Steve Beshear’s easy win in the Kentucky gubernatorial race tonight is very important, but the more dramatic news is that Democrats appear to have won control of the Virginia Senate. Given the Commonwealth’s well-earned red-state reputation, this is a good sign for Democrats nationally going into 2008. Yes, Virginia, you are a purple state now.

The folks over at National Review have published a brief symposium wherein ten conservative writers have to make their predictions for the presidential election that will occur one year from now.
They are all over the lot when it comes to the Republican nominee and the ultimate outcome. But all ten assume that Hillary Clinton will be the Democatic nominee.
While these conservatives may have individually and rationally reached this conclusion on their own, you get the sense that they really can’t imagine the “enemy” side of the ballot being led by anyone else.

It’s Off-Year Election Day in various spots around the country. RealClearPolitics offers a good basic preview of contests to watch in Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi, New Jersey, Utah and Washington.

Long after his leading rivals “went up,” and well after his early lead in Iowa began to dissipate, John Edwards is now running his first television ad in that state. Given his emphasis on national security issues in his efforts to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton in other venues, it’s interesting that this ad totally dwells on Edwards’ (and his wife’s) commitment to “stand up for working people,” and promises to show “spine” without any reference to Iraq, or for that matter, to George W. Bush.
You’d have to guess the ad is aimed at expanding Edwards’ base of labor support in Iowa, and it’s well-timed to take advantage of national pundit sentiment that he’s beginning to win Democratic candidate debates. But it’s still a pretty soft appeal for a guy whose campaign is increasingly focused on the idea that Hillary Clinton represents the corrupt status quo.