Pollsters may have problems with the Iowa caucuses' probable move to Jan. 5, says an MSNBC/Wall Street Journal pollster. But an Iowa expert isn't so sure.
NBC/WSJ pollster Peter Hart tells First Read:
No self-respecting polling company does polling between the 20th and 25th of December. So we very well might have no idea how Iowa will break until after the results are in.
University of Iowa political science professor David Redlawsk says a poll before Jan. 5 is possible, but the details may be slimmer than in most polls.
A large polling firm can do a reasonable poll -- if it is short enough, and if all they want is the horse race it can be -- in just a couple days. So it may be possible to poll during the half week run up to the caucus. However, even if they do, there would be little time for the results to be released and digested. I'm not so sure you can't poll between Christmas and New Year's. It may be harder to get respondents, but it may be possible. Even so. we are less likely to have detailed polling if we have a Jan. 5 caucus.
The week between Christmas and New Year's Day is especially challenging this year. With the holidays falling on Tuesdays, the calendar sets up an extended Christmas weekend running from Friday, Dec. 21 though Boxing Day on Wednesday, Dec. 26. The New Years weekend runs from Friday, Dec. 28 through Tuesday. Jan. 1. And if the Hawkeye or Cyclone football teams have good seasons, bowl games may be another distraction.
Hart also says the earlier time frame "changes the entire rhythm of the political cycle in a way that cannot be fully appreciated, maybe not until after the nominating contests are over." He thinks Howard Dean would have won a caucus on Jan. 5 or 7 in 2004.
"That assumes that no one would have known it was coming," says Redlawsk. "Campaigns and candidates gear their plans to the date. So if the caucus had been earlier in the past the campaigns would have been doing their planning knowing that and the timing of everything would have changed. It's way too simplistic to say the results would have been different."
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