Divining Big Differences in State and National Polls

WASHINGTON — Take a look at national polls for the 2008 presidential sweepstakes, and two trends quickly take shape.

Rudy Giuliani is running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney to head the GOP presidential ticket next year. And Hillary Rodham Clinton is running away with the Democratic nomination, trouncing Barack Obama by 20 percentage points or more.

In Iowa, though, where caucus-goers will gather Thursday night to cast their lot, Obama leads Clinton by 4 points in a recent poll, Giuliani is struggling to hold onto fourth place and Mike Huckabee is in the lead.

Just who's calling this horse race anyway?

"At this stage, the national numbers matter very little," said Matthew Wilson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "The polls in the early states matter a lot more."

There are good reasons, it turns out, for the sharp differences in state and national polling, and a strong consensus among analysts like Wilson that, for the moment at least, it's the numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire that count.

Americans in most places are paying only casual attention to early campaigning by the 16 - at last count - Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.

"I just don't think people have tuned in yet," said Richard Clark, manager of the Survey Research Unit for the University of Georgia's Institute of Government.

To the extent most Americans are paying attention, said Clark, it's name recognition that's driving the polls. When it comes to familiar household names, nobody trumps Clinton, who spent eight years as a high-profile first lady during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton, before being elected to the U.S. Senate.

On the Republican side, Giuliani secured national recognition for his role as New York mayor during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Millions of Americans got a first glimpse of Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, when he rescued the Olympic Games from scandal and red ink three years ago in Salt Lake City.

Those impressions don't always hold up all that well in the saturation retail politics of Iowa and New Hampshire, where campaigning often comes right to the family doorstep.

"They get to see them up close," said Clark.

And the sails a national reputation brings can be quickly trimmed if a candidate doesn't perform well in those bellwether states.

"Let's say Barack Obama wins in Iowa. He's going to get a large amount of publicity and the story will be 'How did Hillary Clinton blow it?' And that's going to change votes in other states," explained Wilson.

Primary voting in New Hampshire takes place on Jan. 8, just five days after voters gather to caucus in Iowa. Candidates that do well in those states will carry that momentum to Michigan, for primary voting on Jan. 15; Nevada for Jan. 19 caucuses; and South Carolina, for GOP primary voting on Jan. 19 and Democratic primaries the following week.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has Clinton with 45 percent of the vote, and Obama trailing with 23 percent. The Dec. 14-17 poll queried 1,008 people nationwide who said they would vote in a Democratic primary or participate in a caucus. It has a 3 percentage point margin of error.

A similar USA Today/Gallup poll taken Dec. 14-16 showed statistically identical results, with Clinton at 45 percent and Obama at 27 percent.

In Iowa, however, Obama led Clinton, 33-29, in a Dec. 13-17 poll by the Washington Post and ABC News. That poll queried 652 Iowans likely to participate in the caucus and has a 4 percentage point margin of error.

On the Republican side, the same NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed Giuliani and Romney tied for first place, with both drawing the support of 20 percent of likely Republican primary voters nationwide.

In Iowa, however, Huckabee leads the pack, with 23 percent support, followed by Romney with 21, according to a Dec. 20-23 poll by the American Research Group, Inc., which queried 600 likely GOP caucus goers in a survey that has a 4 percentage point margin of error.

Important as they are as indicators, however, state primary polls are no sure stamp on where a race is headed, as Howard Dean learned the hard way four years ago. Though polls showed the former Vermont governor a strong favorite to win the Democratic caucus in Iowa, he finished in third place, blindsided by the support received by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

Polls are acutely unreliable, it turns out, in Iowa, where caucus goers must invest several hours in a process that requires them to literally stand in their candidate's corner in a living room, church meeting hall or school cafeteria on caucus night.

With perhaps 150,000 Democrats and 100,000 Republicans likely to turn out statewide on Jan. 3, it's a polling challenge to pinpoint those voters who are actually going to show up for the caucus.

"Certainly in Iowa it's a very difficult thing to predict who's going to turn out on a snowy night and spend a couple hours at that caucus," said Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning Washington think tank.

And Iowans, pollsters have found, tend to keep their cards close to their vest, keeping poll ratings fluid right up to caucus night.

"Only about one-third of Iowa voters say that their preferences are fixed, the rest of them are open," said Calvin Jillson, professor of politics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"About one-third make up their minds in the last week and about one-third make up their minds in the last day or so," he said. "So those polls can be off."