Christmas Polling in Iowa

The Christmas shopping season for Iowans is about to become a lot more hectic: Democratic pollster Peter Hart tells First Read, the blog for the political unit of NBC News, that ­ in the words of First Read authors Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro ­ “the revision of the primary calendar — moving Iowa forward to the first few days in January — is really the most important political event that has happened in the past few months.” Hart explains, as paraphrased by First Read:

From his point of view, it 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. Hart says it would be interesting to re-play many of the past caucuses if they were held on January 5th or 7th; his guess is that Dean would have won in 2004, and that Reagan would have defeated Bush in 1980. Perhaps most significant of all is that no one will know who’s up and who’s down right before Iowa. No self-respecting polling company, he says, 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. If Hart’s right and the leader before Christmas is the leader on Caucus day, does that make the window between Thanksgiving and December 20 the three most important three weeks of the primary campaign?

Chris Suellentrop

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Justices Denied

Karl Rove can’t even take credit for remaking the Supreme Court: Conservatives who are dissatisfied with the presidency of George W. Bush can comfort themselves with the knowledge that the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito secured the court for legal conservatism for a generation.

But don’t thank, or blame, Karl Rove, or even George W. Bush, for the Roberts and Alito nominations, says Jonah Goldberg in his Los Angeles Times column. Grass-roots conservatives imposed the Roberts and Alito nominations on Rove and Bush, Goldeberg suggests, against the two men’s “first instincts.” He writes:

Meanwhile, Bush’s two most important domestic accomplishments in the second term have been the appointments of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court. But even these masterstrokes ran at least partly against the first instincts of Bush and Rove. If they’d had their druthers, Miers and Alberto Gonzales would be on the court today — a calamity from which neither the republic nor the Republican Party would soon have recovered.

Chris Suellentrop