No, Despite the Polls, It’s Not Really a Horse Race (Not Yet, Anyway)

[Kingstree]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/us/politics/21politics.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin

For at least a generation, press critics have complained bitterly about the news media’s obsession with polls and the horse-race aspect of the presidential campaign. The constant focus on who is ahead is a pointless distraction, those critics argue, from what should be the real substance of the campaign, like what the candidates would do as president.

But there is another reason to avoid putting too much stock in any assessment of the horse race, more than six months before the voting begins in the Iowa caucuses: It may have very little relationship to the ultimate outcome.

Events change, voters change, candidates and campaigns implode, new ones enter. (Like, say, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who appeared to edge closer to a race-scrambling independent candidacy this week.) Even the activists, at this stage of the campaign, are not terribly focused or committed. Pollsters say they may be measuring whims and name recognition as much as settled judgments.

Yes, the national polls show certain patterns: Among the Republicans, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York tends to be at the head of the pack; former Senator Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee and Senator John McCain of Arizona are right behind, and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is moving up behind them. And yet, consider this: Only 44 percent of the Republicans who said the abortion issue was “very important to them” could identify Mr. Giuliani as the “pro-choice candidate” in a recent Pew Research Center poll.

As Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew center, put it: “People aren’t paying a lot of attention. Their attitudes are soft, so tests of their preferences are not reliable.”

A little history backs him up. Four years ago at this point, Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic nomination was beginning to take off; his fund-raising, especially over the Internet, shocked his rivals in the end-of-June campaign finance reports.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Sure it's a horse race,

but the pack is just coming up on the first turn.

got a looooong way to go.