New poll numbers from the American Research Group reveal significant improvement in former Gov. Mike Huckabee’s standing in Iowa, bouncing to 14% support after the Iowa Republican Straw Poll earlier this month.  ARG’s polling indicated that Huckabee had the support of only 1% of Iowa Republican caucus-goers last month.
While the ARG’s likely caucus-goer screen is [...]

After the Straw Poll, Huckabee and Brownback have both significantly downsized their Iowa campaigns despite their top three finishes.
For Huckabee, who got the second-place spot in Ames, the downsizing is temporary:
Rather than kicking his Iowa campaign up a notch, second-place Ames Straw Poll finisher Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas downsized his Iowa operation to just [...]

Because of what I do, I get asked a lot about how the “MSM” — I’ll call it the “traditional media” — approaches blogs in Iowa. Because I think that over the past few months I’ve developed an interesting answer to the question, and because at cocktail parties I am not always as articulate [...]

The as-yet-mostly-untold story of yesterday’s Iowa GOP Straw Poll in Ames is not about dueling bands and barbecues, of red inked thumbs or voting machine malfunctions; it is about tax policy. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won the coveted second-place spot over Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback on that alone.Brownback’s record on taxes was spotless enough [...]

All day today, I liveblogged from the Ames Straw Poll on Iowa Independent. I think/hope that I did a reasonable job. I’m pretty sure I gave Marc Ambinder and Jonathan Martin a run for their money, but we’ll see. When we were waiting for results to come, we were getting something like [...]

I’ll be on The Rachel Maddow Show live tonight at 6:30 eastern/5:30 central to give my take on tomorrow’s Ames Straw Poll with guest-host Isaac-Davy Aronson. If you are in Iowa, you can’t listen on the airwaves, but you can listen here.

I don’t know who is paying for this (it does not have a “paid for” on it, and it does not appear to stick to Ron Paul’s campaign messaging/packaging), but someone is advertising for Ron Paul’s Straw Poll GOTV effort on the Des Moines, IA, Facebook network. One can only assume it’s also running [...]

Most media types don’t get the Ames Straw Poll in the least. They describe it as an election, as a test of candidate strength, as a predictor of how the Iowa Caucuses would turn out if they were held today, etc. Almost every detail you have heard about it on cable news is [...]

Congressman Ron Paul’s R-LOVE-ution is on the air with a 30-second TV spot that, according to the Register, will run in Sioux City, Des Moines, and Cedar Rapids. The ad, which is better than Tancredo’s but worse than everyone else’s, highlights Paul’s record on fiscal policy, emphasizing that he has never accepted his Congressional [...]

About a month ago, I heard Ron Paul’s campaign staff pledge that they would get 10,000 of their supporters to the Ames Straw Poll during their alternative event next to the ICA/ITR Republican Candidates Forum, from which Paul was excluded. Then it was revealed — on Paul’s own official Straw Poll site — that [...]