Everything’s Changing

[Geee]

National Review:


Election year has finally arrived, well after the beginning of a turbulent and unpredictable election season, and voting begins on Tuesday in the Iowa Republican caucuses.

The few days of post-Christmas polling have shown the numbers oscillating and opinion changing in ways it hadn’t earlier in the campaign.

Before Christmas, Barack Obama’s job rating was on a bit of an uptick, nudging toward but not quite reaching 50 percent approval in several polls. But two polls taken in the three days after Christmas by Gallup and Rasmussen show him with solidly negative job ratings, and Rasmussen shows him trailing Mitt Romney 45 percent to 39 percent — his worst showing against Romney ever.
Americans want to think well of their presidents and want their presidents to succeed. Those desires will work for Obama.

But these latest numbers are a reminder that most Americans believe the Obama Democrats’ policies have failed to revive the economy and have produced an overlarge, under-competent, and crony-capitalist government.

We’ll see over the next months how the president’s rating fares, but we’ll see in two days, when Republicans head to the precinct caucuses held at 1,774 locations in the 99 counties of Iowa, whether recent opinion shifts in polls are for real.

A necessary caveat here is that the polling in this case is particularly dicey, since pollsters are trying to measure opinion among a relatively small number of Republican caucusgoers — 119,000 in 2008 in a state of 3 million. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

That said, poll results and reports of political events on the ground suggest that opinion is shifting and that the caucus results could look a lot different from the pre-Christmas polls.