Mike Lux Calls the Iowa Race Wrong

On OpenLeft Monday evening, Mike Lux had this to say after his trip to Iowa last week:

My overall sense of the Iowa race so far is that Hillary’s team has run the smartest race; that Obama’s team is taking the biggest risk (with the biggest potential upside); and that the Edwards team is still very much in the hunt but have, to date, missed their best opportunity.

He concludes that if the caucuses were held today, Sen. Hillary Clinton would win, and Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards would come in second and third. (My sense is that he thinks Obama might edge out Edwards, but he does not say so specifically.)

While Mike’s analysis is interesting, I don’t think it’s right. My assessment is still that if the Caucuses were held today, Edwards would win. Second place would be a toss-up that I might throw to Obama, simply because he has spent so much more time in the state than Clinton.

Mike misses three important indicators of caucus success:

1. Depth of support: As the second-tier campaign staffers will tell you, polls indicate that as many as 80% of likely caucus-goers will say when asked that they could change their minds about whom they’ll support between now and January. Disproportionately, these folks skew towards the top three, as can be expected. But of the supporters who do not expect that they will change their mind between now and January, disproportionately they are supporting Edwards. The Edwards staff got to work in Iowa early, and they already had lists of voter IDs from 2004 to start with, allowing them to build deep support earlier than Obama and Clinton.
2. Polls with tight voter screens: The tighter the voter screen of a caucus poll, the better Edwards does (tight screens usually measure an Edwards lead of at least a few points). This is a good sign for Edwards. And while this may not be damning for a campaign like Obama’s, which is ostensibly focused on unlikely caucus goers, it is bad news for the Clinton campaign, which Mike argues is directly going after over-50s who are considered most likely to caucus.
3. Time on the ground: Caucus goers are very interested in meeting candidates and asking them questions before they commit to supporting a candidate. Edwards has held 120 events in Iowa in 2007, and he spent much of 2006 here as well. Obama has held nearly 100 events this year, and Clinton has held merely 60. Caucusing is an ordeal that Iowans don’t choose to endure lightly, and they will become very aware of the disparity in total number of appearances in the state before caucus night no matter how smart the Clinton campaign is.

Projecting the January results right now is impossible. There are a lot of variables, particularly, as Mike correctly observes, for the Obama campaign. One Mike misses, though, is the caucus date itself, which is still up in the air. Because Obama will be relying heavily on college students (both for votes and for volunteers) the current January 14 date allows students from out of state — more of whom are from Illinois than any other state — the opportunity to come back in time to caucus. But it also means that students are heavily concentrated in a few precincts, which means they won’t be worth as many delegates.

Moving the date to early January (which is likely) means out-of-state students will not be able to participate, but it also means that in-state students will be distributed better throughout the state, which means they may be worth more delegates. The early date also makes organizing and GOTC very difficult, because campaigns have to figure out where students are from, not just where they are registered to vote at school.

So in my mind Clinton is not in nearly as strong a position as Mike suggests, even though it looks like they are always in control. Edwards has the best organization and the deepest support, and Obama’s success is really hard to predict.