CNN Iowa poll: Romney 25, Paul 22, Santorum 16, Gingrich 14
posted at 4:29 pm on December 28, 2011 by Allahpundit
In Iowa, both Romney and Paul are each up five points among likely caucus goers from a CNN/Time/ORC poll conducted at the start of December. The new survey indicates that Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, is at 16% support, up 11 points from the beginning of the month, with Gingrich at 14%, down from 33% in the previous poll. Since Gingrich’s rise late last month and early this month in both national and early voting state surveys, he’s come under attack by many of the rival campaigns…
Santorum is campaigning on a shoestring budget, but he’s visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties and has made a strong pitch towards social conservative voters, who are very influential here in Iowa on the Republican side. Wednesday Santorum was up with a new radio spot on Hawkeye State airwaves touting endorsements by social conservative leaders. His pitch may be starting to pay off.
“Most of Santorum’s gains have come among likely caucus participants who are born-again or evangelical, and he now tops the list among that crucial voting bloc, with support from 22% of born-agains compared to 18% for Paul, 16% for Romney, and 14% for Gingrich,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
So there’s the long-awaited Santorum surge among social cons, who are finally giving him a first look at the perfect moment after flirtations this fall with Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich. Two caveats, though, one minor and one major. The minor: PPP’s poll published this morning found Santorum stuck at 10 percent, still behind Gingrich and Bachmann. Are their numbers the outlier or are CNN’s? The major: According to the crosstabs, CNN only polled … registered Republicans in Iowa. That means they’re badly underestimating support for Paul, who’s cleaning up among Democrats and independents who are planning to vote in the caucuses. They polled New Hampshire too and did a bit better with that sample, including indies who are likely to vote (Romney leads Paul there by nearly 30 points), but I’m not sure the Iowa data is worth anything. Stick with PPP’s numbers for the time being: Paul 24, Romney 20, Gingrich 13, Bachmann 11.
Got an update or two coming, so stand by.
Update: WaPo quantifies the flaw in CNN’s poll: “in early Dec. Post-ABC Iowa poll, registerd GOP were 83% of potential caucusgoers, with Paul about 2X better among non-Reps.” And PPP notes that if they made CNN’s sample mistake, they’d also have had Romney ahead of Paul.
Update: Erick Erickson sees Romney’s dream coming true:
Santorum has no money or organization outside of Iowa and cannot win the nomination, but Iowans love a guy who sucks up to them and makes sure they know he loves the babies.
As a pro-lifer myself, I have to throw up a bit in my mouth that Iowa conservatives are seriously considering Rick Santorum, which will only help Mitt Romney, a guy who even after his supposedly heartfelt conversion to life put some seriously pro-abortion judges on the Massachusetts bench hiding behind the “Well it was Massachusetts for Pete’s sake” defense…
Rick Santorum is more conservative than Mitt Romney. He is a strong social conservative and has taken a lot of bullets from the left because of his stand. But he is not as strong a fiscal conservative as he claims and the real issue here is social conservatives in Iowa risk Mitt Romney’s election by supporting a guy who cannot get traction or money outside of Iowa.
Rick Santorum will not be the nominee. That’s the reality. But his rise hurts Bachmann, Gingrich, and Perry in Iowa — all of whom have better organizations and better shots beyond Iowa.
Philip Klein also imagines Romney gleefully rubbing his hands at the new dynamic. Santorum’s been following the same underpants-gnome strategy in Iowa as Huntsman has in New Hampshire:
Step one: Camp out there and become the de facto hometown favorite/Not Romney
Step two: Win
Step three: ????
Step four: Nominee!
Step three, I guess, is “momentum,” but momentum works a lot better when you have money and organization to help carry it forward. The only way Santorum becomes a real long-term threat, I think, is if he and Paul finish in the top two in Iowa and then Paul shocks Romney in New Hampshire. (Which is unlikely: Mitt’s now a 90 percent favorite there according to Nate Silver’s model.) That would leave Romney smelling like a loser and would set Santorum up for a possible win in South Carolina. Even then, I’m not sure how he’d outlast Romney in Florida and then in the long slog for delegates on Super Tuesday and beyond, but it would establish him as the lone remaining alternative to Mitt and Ron Paul for conservatives who can’t stomach either.
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What did those concerns and alerts consist of, exactly? Without knowing that, it’s hard for me to get all outraged at the US govt. at this point.
It’s rather easy in retrospect to blame the FBI, but all they can do is interview the guy or keep surveillance on him, and they did interview him.
How does one predict that a guy will in fact blow up Americans at some time in the future?
If they knew back in 2011 or whenever that the guy was looking at radical Islamic web sites, what then? I’m sure there are other nuts in the U.S. today who are fans of those sites too, but are all of them going to blow up Americans, and how do you determine that, or which ones will do so, and when?
The part I find strange is that immediately following the attack on the marathon, one would think the FBI and other authorities would immediately go to a “Prior List ‘O’ Terror Suspects in the Vicinity of Boston” and skim down the page for names and start investigating those people, but it looks as though they did not do this.
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 3:59 PM
Tamerlan is being viewed only now as a suspect in light of the marathon bombings – prior to that, nobody suspected it. Last I heard, it’s still not been confirmed he is in fact responsible for the murders of the 3 guys in Boston.
Even if police figured “this looks like an Islamic style murder,” and even suspect that Tamerlan guy, how were they to know he would later blow people up?
A lot of men beat their girlfriends; those same guys don’t usually go on to make pressure cooker bombs and blow up spectators at sporting events.
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 4:06 PM
I’ve read that some Hindus in other parts of the world kill Christians.
Convert or we will kill you, Hindu lynch mobs tell fleeing Christians
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 4:20 PM
Maybe George W Bush only spouted the rhetoric about Islam being about peace so as to calm down the Islamic community worldwide?
Around that time, I remember a lot of people on the left were throwing a fit about not “profiling Muslim” (or Muslim looking people), how it was wrong for America to single out that one religion, etc., and some of the imams IIRC were already saying in the media in their nations that the USA was going to war against all Muslims, not just the Islamic kooks behind 9/11.
We’re talking about people (radical Muslims) who cause riots, burn property, and kill and rape people, over the least little thing, such as cartoon drawings of their prophet.
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 4:31 PM
Actually his words were “… slander the prophet of Islam”.
Moreover you can only slander a person by speaking untruths, so it is perfectly OK to speak of Mohammed’s violent, cowardly, deceitful character, and his ignorance because that is the truth.
In order to slander the barbarian of Arabia you’d have to falsely accuse him of … well, that’s tricky … parking his camel behind a sand-dune reserved for use by disabled barbarians, perhaps.
YiZhangZhe on April 24, 2013 at 5:59 PM
CLICK!! and the light goes on over Ed’s head.
Look, there isn’t a cop or an agent or a fed out there that had any experience with the system who didn’t see this coming.
My buddy and ex-partner worked with them years ago during the Bush admin. He predicted every action that has been taken by the bureaucracy since the bombing. He told me Tuesday the day after, “They already know who it is, they had a file. The problem for them is explaining it. The efforts now will be all about CYA.”
He then went down a list over the next days pointing out what will happen.
1. The feds knew. They realized almost immediately who the bombers were. They didn’t know who else was involved (thus the false release of other photos). The first thing any cops does is pull possible suspects. How long do you think it took to find one Russia warned us about who lived two miles away, fit the description and had a young brother who looked like the second bomber? Hours? Maybe. Then there is the agent who created the file and his JTTF partner. They knew just by looking at the pics.
2. They were ALL ABOUT CYA up and down the line. The Obama administration’s ideology failed in Benghazi and now in Boston. The FBI is hogtied by new definitions and rules. The organizations, after all the power we’ve given them, still don’t talk to each other.
3. They will attempt to control the narrative. If you’ll note, every time there is a FBI investigation they always find a “cell” of more than one. However, if a bad guy gets by them it is always a lone wolf. Already the pliant MSM is being fed “they acted alone”, “they had no help”, blah blah while inside the investigation they are scrambling to find out just how big this is. We know it reaches into Dagestan and Russia. We know the mosque is involved. We know there is now at least one more person involved here. Yet, we get “move along nothing to see here.”
4. The Saudi was probably some rich spoiled kid secreted into the US on a speedpass by Obama’s people. That violates the law, which never slowed that Chicago crowd down. Now it’s cover up time. And as time passes, they’ll hope it goes the way of F&F and not Watergate.
5. The investigation will take two tracks. The real cops will be trying to solve it and stop the rest of the cell from acting. The bosses will be picking out Brook Brothers suits for their day in Congress and practicing a shocked dumfounded look in front of the mirror like the one Janet had the other day. “I’m Shocked, SHOCKED to find the system has failed again! We need to fix it. Yes, that is the course forward. Not fire anyone, not jail anyone for lying, but this time fix it!”
6. You have to understand just how serious this threat was to the Russians. To have them struggle through their bureaucracy to warn ours, repeatedly, even though we acted like idiots means they were scared for us.
That’s right. The Russians were more worried about our citizens than Obama.
Think about that.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2013/04/24/conspiracy-no-taking-advantage-of-a-crisis-sadly-yes/
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2013/04/21/now-that-the-fbi-is-sweeping-up-the-cell-it-is-time-to-ask-how-they-missed-it/
archer52 on April 25, 2013 at 7:04 AM
Obama won’t even allow the FBI or DHS to acknowledge there is such a thing as an Islamic terrorist.
So how could we ever expect the FBI or DHS to stop any terrorist act under this administration?
Axion on April 25, 2013 at 4:47 PM
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