Six days before the Iowa caucuses, no Republican candidate has a clear lead, social conservatives remain scattered among several contenders, and new television commercials are launched on almost a daily basis. Numbers from the two latest opinion polls and news from the campaign trail are after the jump, along with some commercials currently showing on Iowa tv screens.

UPDATE: Added numbers from a new CNN poll and the latest Ron Paul tv ad.

Maybe “Organize, organize, organize and then get hot at the end” isn’t outdated Iowa caucus wisdom after all. Public Policy Polling’s latest survey of Iowa Republicans finds Representative Ron Paul slightly ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich dropped to third place.

UPDATE: The Republican polling firm Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research has also picked up on the Gingrich slide and Paul gain. Details are at the end of this post.

Seven Republican candidates take the stage tonight as Fox News and the Iowa GOP co-host a presidential debate in Sioux City. I’ll be live-blogging after the jump, where I’ve also posted some recent news about the race in Iowa.

UPDATE: Scroll down for the live-blog.

Seven Six Republican presidential candidates debate tonight in Des Moines, the first time the group has debated since Herman Cain left the race and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich became the front-runner. I plan to live-blog tonight’s debate here, but I wanted to post this thread early to give Bleeding Heartland readers a chance to talk about the race. Links and recent news from the campaign are after the jump.

UPDATE: Scroll down for the live-blog.

Who would have believed it back when Greg Ganske seemed like Newt Gingrich’s last friend left in Iowa? Within the last ten days, five six separate pollsters have released surveys showing former the House speaker with a clear lead among likely Republican caucus-goers.

Iowa Republican caucus-goers have switched their allegiance from one joke candidate selling books to another. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich leads the field in the latest poll by Selzer and Co for the Des Moines Register. Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney trails the latest “not Romney” contender by a larger margin than in the Register’s other polls this year.

Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain and Representative Ron Paul have pushed former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney into third place in a new Iowa Republican poll for Iowa State University, the Cedar Rapids Gazette and KCRG TV. However, less than two months before the Iowa caucuses, the majority of likely participants are still not committed to any candidate.

UPDATE: Now Rasmussen has a new Iowa poll showing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich way ahead among likely caucus-goers, followed by Romney and Cain. Details are below.

Four presidential candidates are new clustered between 17 and 20 percent support among likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers, according to Selzer and Co’s latest poll of Iowa Republicans, conducted for Bloomberg News.

Without a doubt, the superlative early voting effort by Democrats and allied groups is largely responsible for Democrat Liz Mathis’ landslide victory over Republican Cindy Golding. Although the results are still unofficial and precinct-level demographics are not yet available, sufficient detail exists to draw some preliminary conclusions from the early reporting.

Democrat Liz Mathis has banked more early votes than Republican Cindy Golding for Tuesday’s special election in Iowa Senate district 18, and a survey by Public Policy Polling puts her narrowly ahead in the final days of the campaign.

Two Republican presidential candidates who have spent very little time in Iowa during the past few months are leading the Des Moines Register’s latest poll of Iowa Republicans.

Public Policy Polling’s latest Iowa survey provides more evidence that former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain is gaining support among Republicans as Texas Governor Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann lose ground.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney narrowly leads while former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain has surged to second place, according to a new NBC News-Marist poll of Iowa Republicans. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is slightly ahead of both Romney and Texas Governor Rick Perry among registered Iowa voters.

Representative Michele Bachmann is replacing the top two national figures in her presidential campaign, as the latest Rasmussen poll of Iowa Republicans shows the largest lead yet for Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Neither a late campaign start nor ignoring the Iowa GOP’s Ames straw poll has hurt Texas Governor Rick Perry’s standing among Iowa Republicans, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling. Perry narrowly leads former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Representatives Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul among the regular GOP primary voters surveyed.

About 61 percent of Iowa registered voters, including overwhelming majorities of Democratic and no-party voters, support same-sex marriage rights, according to a new survey conducted by graduate students at Drake University. The same survey indicated that 62.5 percent of Iowa voters oppose a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. Those are the highest levels of support for marriage equality I’ve seen in any Iowa polling. I am skeptical that an opinion poll conducted in a more traditional way would find similar numbers.

More results from the online survey and details about its methodology are after the jump.

The Des Moines Register’s new poll of 400 likely Republican caucus-goers indicates that Representative Michele Bachmann is gaining ground. Selzer and Co surveyed Iowans between June 19 and 22, and the margin of error for the sample of likely caucus-goers is plus or minus 4.9 percent. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney leads the field with 23 percent support, but he has already indicated that he won’t invest heavily in Iowa this cycle. Bachmann nearly matched Romney in the Register’s poll with 22 percent. Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain placed a distant third with 10 percent, followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Ron Paul (7 percent each), former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (6 percent), former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (4 percent) and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman (2 percent).

Romney’s best numbers are among moderates, people with less than a college education, and those earning less than $50,000 per year. Bachmann did particularly well with respondents who are very conservative, well-educated and/or between the ages of 45 and 64. The encouraging poll numbers will give her more buzz just as she is scheduled to formally announce her candidacy (for the second or third time) in Waterloo on June 27.

The results are terrible for Pawlenty, who doesn’t seem to be getting any traction out of his large staff and many Iowa visits. Putting a less-bad spin on the numbers,

Republican pollster Randy Gutermuth pointed out that the Iowa Poll took place before Pawlenty’s television ads, direct mail and other paid voter outreach had time to penetrate.

“It’s way too early to be writing off Tim Pawlenty,” said Gutermuth, who is not affiliated with any presidential candidate. “I’m sure they’d rather be leading today, but I don’t think they’re jumping out of buildings either.”

Maybe not jumping out of buildings, but eager to change the subject as soon as this poll came out. On June 26, Pawlenty’s campaign announced the formation of an Iowa Legislative Steering Committee. Legislators serving on the committee cover all regions of the state: Iowa Senators Randy Feenstra (district 2), Rob Bacon (district 5) and Shawn Hamerlinck (district 42), and State Representatives Chip Baltimore (district 48), Joel Fry (district 95), Erik Helland (district 69), Chris Hagenow (district 59), Steve Lukan (district 32), Linda Miller (district 82) and Matt Windschitl (district 56). Unfortunately for Pawlenty, all the endorsements in the world won’t turn things around unless the candidate starts connecting with caucus-goers. Right now Bachmann leads him even as a second choice for Iowans who prefer Romney–and that’s without any of the candidates picking apart Pawlenty’s fiscal record and heavy state borrowing.

Speaking of the Register’s opinion polls and caucus coverage, the Sunday paper announced that Jennifer Jacobs will be the Register’s chief political writer. She replaces Thomas Beaumont, who took a job with the Associated Press this spring.

Any comments about the Republican presidential race are welcome in this thread.

UPDATE: Douglas Burns tells us what a top British bookmaker says. Even before this poll was released, Ladbrokes gave Bachmann the best chance of winning the Iowa caucuses.

SECOND UPDATE: More detailed questions results from the new Iowa poll are here. I’ve highlighted some interesting results from the “issue” questions after the jump.

President Barack Obama got a little bounce following Osama bin Laden’s killing, and the weak Republican field of challengers has helped give the president an advantage in recent swing-state polls. Public Policy Polling’s latest Iowa survey found Obama leading all the named Republican candidates by at least 9 points, for instance.

However, Obama’s position looks much more tenuous if the 2012 election is about “the economy, stupid.” According to the latest nationwide Washington Post/ABC News poll, disapproval for how Obama has managed the economy is at record-high levels, and the incumbent trails former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney among registered voters.

The “great recession” was not Obama’s fault, but no one can credibly claim his administration did the best it could to boost the job market and housing sector. By next November, the U.S. may be in a double-dip recession. Complicating matters for Obama, he has played into the eventual GOP nominee’s strongest arguments against his record on the economy. Follow me after the jump for details on the new national poll and the latest bad economic news.

More Iowa voters disapprove than approve of Terry Branstad’s performance as governor, according to the latest statewide survey by Public Policy Polling. Of 1,109 Iowa voters polled between April 15 and April 17, just 41 percent approved of Branstad’s performance, while 45 percent disapproved and 14 percent were not sure. In a hypothetical rematch between Branstad and Governor Chet Culver, 48 percent of respondents said they would vote for Culver, while 46 percent would vote for Branstad. Full results and crosstabs are here (pdf). Branstad was in net positive territory with men (45 percent approve/43 percent disapprove), but women disapproved by a 48-37 margin. The sample doesn’t perfectly match the Iowa electorate; I noticed that 38 percent of respondents said they were Democrats, 33 percent said they were Republicans and 29 percent said they were independents. As of April 2011, Iowa has 1,955,217 active voters, of whom 647,060 are registered Democrats (33 percent), 610,006 are registered Republicans (31 percent), and 696,061 are no-party voters (36 percent).

PPP’s last Iowa poll, taken in January, found only 40 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of Branstad, while 44 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

The new survey suggests a plurality of Iowa voters accept marriage equality. Asked “which best describes your opinion on gay marriage,” 35 percent of respondents said “gay couples should be allowed to legally marry,” 29 percent said “gay couples should be allowed to form civil unions but not legally marry,” 33 percent said “there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship,” and 2 percent were unsure. PPP’s January survey of Iowa voters asked the question differently and found 41 percent said same-sex marriage should be legal, 52 percent said it should not be legal, and 8 percent were unsure.

PPP also recorded job approval numbers for Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin and favorable/unfavorable numbers for Iowa’s five U.S. House representatives, Christie Vilsack and Tom Vilsack. Grassley and Harkin were both in net positive territory, but Grassley’s ratings (57/30) were much stronger than Harkin’s (47/38). It’s hard to read anything into the favorability ratings of the House members, since the opinion of voters statewide won’t necessarily reflect representatives’ standing in their own districts.

Share any relevant thoughts in this thread.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that to my knowledge, Chet Culver’s approval ratings didn’t fall to the low 40s until the second half of 2009, when he was dealing with a recession, state budget crunch and the film tax credit fiasco.

About three-quarters of Iowa voters are against raising electricity rates now to cover the cost of building a new nuclear reactor in the future, according to a poll released today. Survey USA polled 600 Iowa registered voters between April 19 and April 21. The environmental non-profit group Friends of the Earth commissioned the survey, which also found that a large majority of respondents would rather invest in renewable energy than nuclear power. Nearly 90 percent said it would be unfair to let MidAmerican Energy keep money raised for nuclear plant construction even if the utility cancels the project.

Survey USA posted full cross-tabs here. After the jump I’ve posted topline results for each of the poll questions and background on Senate File 390, which the upper chamber will vote on this week.

The Des Moines Register continues to release results from its latest statewide poll. Selzer and Co surveyed 800 Iowa adults between February 13 and 16. Bleeding Heartland discussed the Register’s poll numbers on Governor Terry Branstad here.

Follow me after the jump to discuss President Barack Obama’s approval inching up in Iowa, slight growth in support for same-sex marriage rights, views on ways to close the state budget gap, and more.

The Des Moines Register’s first statewide poll since Governor Terry Branstad returned to office shows that 45 percent of respondents approve of the job Branstad is doing, 35 percent disapprove and 20 percent are not sure. Selzer and Co surveyed 800 Iowa adults between February 13 and 16, and the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent. Ann Selzer commented in the Des Moines Register over the weekend, “Iowans are giving Gov Branstad no honeymoon.”

Elected officials never like to see their approval ratings below 50 percent, but the Register poll numbers are better for Branstad than Public Policy Polling’s latest Iowa survey. Just 40 percent of Iowa voters polled by PPP in January had a favorable opinion of Branstad, while 44 percent had an unfavorable opinion. Those low numbers probably don’t reflect a big drop in support for Branstad since November, but they underscore how strongly the 2010 voter pool skewed Republican in Iowa.

The Register’s new poll indicates that most Iowans don’t expect Branstad to fulfill key campaign promises. Asked about various goals Branstad mentioned while running for governor, respondents who were “mostly skeptical” the governor could accomplish the goal outnumbered those who were “mostly confident” he would succeed on every question.

Cut state spending by 15 percent over 5 years: 47 percent mostly confident, 49 percent mostly skeptical

Cut regulations that hamper business growth: 44 percent mostly confident, 49 percent mostly skeptical

Cut corporate income tax rates: 39 percent mostly confident, 52 percent mostly skeptical

Cut commercial property tax rates: 36 percent mostly confident, 57 percent mostly skeptical

Add 200,000 jobs within five years: 21 percent mostly confident, 76 percent mostly skeptical

Raise family incomes 25 percent over five years: 13 percent mostly confident, 84 percent mostly skeptical

The Register’s Tom Beaumont noted in his write-up of the poll,

Some Iowa economists said during the campaign that Branstad’s goals were unrealistic. The number of jobs in Iowa has grown by 233,000 since 1981, according to the Iowa Department of Workforce Development.

Family incomes in Iowa grew by 21.7 percent from 1999 to 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Although Iowa has experienced months of economic and job growth, respondents for the Register’s new poll still see signs of economic distress. About 47 percent of respondents said Iowa is on the wrong track, compared to just 40 percent who see the state headed in the right direction. Some 47 percent of respondents said they are “personally still feeling the effects of a recession” and 41 percent said they are not personally feeling a recession but are “seeing it affect others” around them. Those numbers were almost identical to findings from the Register’s Iowa poll from January 2009, when the economy was by various measures in worse shape.

A third poll this month finds former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee with an early lead among Iowans likely to participate in the 2012 Republican caucuses. James Q. Lynch brought the latest poll to my attention. Strategic National surveyed 410 Republican Iowa caucus-goers on January 18 about their preferences for the next presidential campaign. Huckabee led the field with 27.5 percent, followed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney with 18.5 percent, 17.6 percent undecided, 12.4 percent for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, 12.2 percent for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, 4.4 percent for former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, 3.7 percent for Representative Michele Bachmann, 1.95 percent for Senator John Thune, just under 1 percent for former Senator Rick Santorum, and 0.24 percent for Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour.

Strategic National has worked for various Republican candidates, but I know nothing about the Michigan-based consulting firm as a pollster. I wonder whether “410 Republican Iowa caucus voting answers” means 410 people who said they will go to the GOP caucuses in 2012, or 410 people who have caucused in the past, or whether some other likely voter screen was used.

Earlier this month, Public Policy Polling and Neighborhood Research both found Huckabee leading Iowa Republican caucus-goers, with Romney in second place.

My hunch is that Huckabee won’t run for president in 2012, for reasons I discussed here. Also, his 2008 campaign manager Chip Saltsman just took a job on the Hill, although Saltsman says he would be available if Huckabee runs for president again.

If Huckabee decides to challenge Obama, he’ll probably get in the race late. Iowa caucus-goers aren’t known for rewarding late starters, but Huckabee already has high name recognition here. In addition, a large portion of GOP caucus-goers have a conservative evangelical orientation. Strategic National’s poll found that nearly 68 percent of respondents said the earth was created in six days, and 45 percent agreed that the earth is about 10,000 years old.

Public Policy Polling’s latest Iowa poll finds President Barack Obama ahead of four potential Republican opponents among 1,077 Iowa voters surveyed between January 7 and 9.

Yesterday’s release showed Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney as the leading Republicans in the early caucus race for 2012, and if the election were today, those two are the only ones who would give Obama a bigger run for his money than McCain did two years ago. Obama tops Huckabee by a slender 47-43 margin, and Romney by 47-41. But against Newt Gingrich, he would prevail, 51-38, and by 53-37 over Sarah Palin.

The difference comes with independents, who make up a full quarter of the electorate, with Democrats and Republicans splitting the rest evenly. Obama has a significant party- unity advantage against all four Republicans, taking 86-91% of his own party and holding each of them to 67-79% of the GOP. But while he leads with unaffiliated voters by a 49- 34 margin over Gingrich and 49-38 over Palin, he actually trails Huckabee, 41-42, and leads Romney only 40-38. Huckabee and Romney do also hold Obama’s crossover support down. While he takes 13% of Republicans to Gingrich’s 5% of Democrats and 17% of Republicans to Palin’s 6% of Democrats, the split against Huckabee is only 10-7, and 11-9 against Romney.

Click here for the summary and here for the full polling memo (pdf). The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3 percent. PPP found 50 percent of Iowa respondents approved of Obama’s performance as president, while 43 percent disapprove. Tom Jensen commented, “When you combine Obama’s relative popularity in the state with the GOP field’s lack of appeal, it looks like things are going to have to get a lot worse for the President over the next 22 months to send Iowa back into the red column.”

I wouldn’t be too sure about that. If the unemployment rate stays roughly the same or inches up, and the Republicans nominate someone without high negatives like Gingrich or Palin, Obama will have to fight to hold Iowa. Huckabee has led several early polls of Iowa Republicans, but I think he would have trouble winning the nomination if he runs. If I were a GOP primary voter, I’d be looking for a bland senator or former governor who could essentially campaign as a generic Republican.

Incidentally, Iowa may become crucial to Obama’s path to victory in 2012. Reapportionment after the 2010 census took six electoral votes away from states Obama won, and several of the 2008 blue states are likely to go Republican next cycle. One path to exactly 270 votes would have the president winning all the states he carried in 2008 except for Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and the second Congressional district in Nebraska.

UPDATE: The Cook Political Report lists Iowa as a tossup for the 2012 presidential race. The other states in that category are Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  

Two polls released this week suggest that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee would be the front-runner in Iowa if he runs for president in 2012. Poll details and some speculation are after the jump.

In a few hours we’ll know whether seven-term Representative Leonard Boswell foiled Iowa Republicans again. For months the third Congressional district was considered a tossup race, and Republican Brad Zaun led in two GOP internal polls released this summer. However, Boswell has led the most recent polls. The Hill commissioned a survey in mid-October that found Boswell beating Zaun 49 percent to 37 percent. According to Tim Sahd’s final rankings for the National Journal, IA-03 isn’t among 90 House seats most likely to change hands.

If Boswell survives a Republican wave election, it will be good news for Iowa Democrats, but not for people who hate negative political advertising. Beginning in August, Boswell and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee simply buried Zaun. Bleeding Heartland discussed early commercials for this race here and here. Details on the closing arguments from both sides are after the jump.

For most of this year, Governor Chet Culver wasn’t campaigning as actively as Republican Terry Branstad, but the governor has been making up for lost time. Since his third debate with Branstad on October 21, Culver has headlined dozens of campaign events around the state. The governor performed well in that debate and has sharpened his stump speech. Everywhere he goes, he says he feels the momentum that will win him another term.

While Iowa Democrats insist the polling trendlines favor Culver, Branstad has led in every poll released since he entered the Iowa governor’s race. His campaign has played it safe the last few weeks and appears to have avoided any “game-changing” mistakes.

A review of recent Branstad and Culver campaign messages is after the jump.

If the Des Moines Register’s new Iowa poll is accurate, Senator Chuck Grassley will cruise to re-election by a similar margin to his last four victories. However, Roxanne Conlin hasn’t thrown in the towel. She spent the final weekend campaigning around the state with Governor Chet Culver and other Democrats. Her schedule is packed for Monday too. Grassley hasn’t held many public events in the past week, but you can hardly turn on a television in Iowa without seeing one of his commercials.

As usual, most Iowa newspapers have endorsed Grassley for re-election, including the Des Moines Register, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Mason City Globe-Gazette, Sioux City Journal, Dubuque Telegraph-Herald and Quad-City Times. Rare exceptions include the Iowa City Press-Citizen (“Conlin can become the senator that Grassley should be by now”) and the Burlington Hawk-Eye (“Roxanne Conlin has not earned this endorsement so much as Grassley has turned his back on it”).

Bleeding Heartland discussed the Senate candidates’ only debate here. It looked like a tie to me, which is as good as a win for the candidate who’s ahead. Closing tv ads and campaign themes for Grassley and Conlin are after the jump.

The latest Iowa poll for the Des Moines Register finds Republicans leading the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races and Iowa’s Supreme Court justices likely to be ousted. Selzer and Co sampled 805 likely Iowa voters between October 26 and 29.

Terry Branstad leads Governor Chet Culver 50 percent to 38 percent. That’s down from a 19-point lead in the Register’s September poll, but still a comfortable advantage. Culver’s campaign released an internal poll last week showing a much tighter race, with Branstad ahead 46-40. I had assumed Republican internal polling also showed Culver gaining, because the Cook Political Report just shifted its rating on the Iowa’s governor’s race from safe Republican to leaning Republican. I don’t think they would make that rating change if private polling showed Branstad at 50 percent with a double-digit lead.

Kathie Obradovich blogged tonight that Culver leads by 9 percent among respondents who had already voted, even though he trails by 12 percent among the whole sample. The Register’s other piece on the new poll refers to “the electorate’s conservative profile” but gives no details about the partisan breakdown of the sample. I will update this post if more details emerge about the poll’s demographics.

Selzer and Co found Senator Chuck Grassley leading Roxanne Conlin 61 percent to 30 percent, virtually the same margin as in the Register’s September Iowa poll.

The news for Iowa Supreme Court justices wasn’t much better:

A third of likely Iowa voters say they will vote to retain Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit. Thirty-seven percent say they will vote to remove all three. Ten percent plan to retain some. The rest either don’t plan to vote on judicial retention or haven’t made up their minds.

I thought it was foolish for the anti-retention groups to feature Representative Steve King in their radio commercials, but if voters throw out the judges, King will be able to take some credit.

Obradovich didn’t give poll numbers for the Congressional races but noted, “Mariannette Miller-Meeks appears to have the best chance of any of the GOP challengers to unseat an incumbent Democrat.” That would be quite an achievement, since Iowa’s second district has the strongest Democratic lean. However, Miller-Meeks has been campaigning hard, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s latest commercial against her is atrocious. It wouldn’t surprise me if that ad drives more voters toward Miller-Meeks than toward incumbent Dave Loebsack.

Iowa Democrats need to get out the vote and hope the Register’s poll contains faulty assumptions about who will turn out on Tuesday.

UPDATE: One positive sign for Loebsack is the large lead Democrats have in early voting in the IA-02 counties (pdf file).

SECOND UPDATE: The best news in the poll: Tom Miller 45, Brenna Findley 34.

Findley, a 34-year-old Dexter lawyer and tea party favorite, has spent more on advertising than Miller, who was first elected in 1978. However, Miller leads Findley among independent voters by 20 percentage points and nets a larger share of support from Democrats than Findley receives from Republicans.

The big purple Judge Bus completed its Iowa tour on October 28, but the groups urging Iowans to oust three Supreme Court justices aren’t winding down their voter persuasion efforts. Representative Steve King has recorded a radio commercial asking Iowans to “send a message against judicial arrogance.”

The ad script is after the jump, along with news on the Judge Bus and the “Homegrown Justice” events, which called on Iowans to retain all the judges on the ballot.

The latest Des Moines Register poll by Selzer and Co finds three Iowa Supreme Court justices are in danger of not being retained this November. The Register’s Monday edition contains details from that portion of the poll, which surveyed 550 likely voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percent.

Among all likely voters, just 31 percent plan to vote to retain all three Supreme Court justices, 12 percent will vote to retain some of them, 29 percent will vote against retaining all of them, 16 percent will probably not fill out that part of the ballot, and 12 percent were unsure. Among respondents who planned to vote on the retentions, 44 percent said they would vote to retain all the Supreme Court judges, 16 percent said they would vote to retain some, and 40 percent will vote to remove all three.

Click here for the Register’s graph showing the breakdown among certain demographic groups (party affiliation, income, union household and born again Christian). Grant Schulte summarized the findings:

Retention supporters and opponents split largely on party lines. Voters most likely to retain all the justices were Democrats, women, younger Iowans, union households, and those with high incomes and college degrees.

Senior citizens, Republicans, men, tea party supporters, born-again Christians, low-income voters and those with only a high school education were more likely to vote “no” to all the justices, the poll found.

I had feared worse numbers, since the Register’s poll was in the field September 19-22, not long after television commercials making the case against retention started running statewide.

Schulte’s article notes,

The retention election could hinge on which side mobilizes the most down-ticket voters. A Register analysis of voting records in the past two non-presidential elections shows that only 60 percent of Iowa voters answered the retention questions for justices and appeals-court judges.

The judges don’t plan to campaign for themselves. Groups backing retention won’t be able to match the advertising budgets of groups on the religious right. I doubt they will reach as many voters as the pastors who plan to preach directly against retaining the judges either.

Ousting three Supreme Court wouldn’t change Iowa’s judicial system right away, but it would give momentum to those who want to replace merit-based selection with a more politicized process. Please remind your friends to fill out the whole ballot and vote yes on the judges up for retention.

At about 4:00 pm today a woman from Lawrence Research called with a survey on the upcoming elections. As always when I receive a political phone call, I didn’t hang up and took as many notes as possible on the poll. Judging from the question wordings, this was a message-testing survey commissioned by a group trying to oust the three Iowa Supreme Court justices who will be on the ballot this November.

The Lawrence Research polling firm is run by Gary Lawrence, who was active in California’s Prop 8 campaign against same-sex marriage. His firm recently conducted a poll purporting to show that Minnesotans want a governor who opposes same-sex marriage rights. The Minnesota Family Council and National Organization for Marriage publicized that poll.

I assume the American Family Association and/or the National Organization for Marriage commissioned the poll for which I was a respondent today. Those groups are lavishly funding the “Iowa for Freedom” effort to oust the judges. Television commercials urging a no vote on retention began running statewide two and a half weeks ago.

If this poll shows that Iowans are poised to vote no on retaining the Supreme Court justices, whoever commissioned it will probably announce the results. I’ll assume the numbers were good for the judges if I don’t see an Iowa for Freedom press release about the poll in the coming weeks.

After the jump I’ve posted as many details as I could about the survey questions.

Speaking of the retention elections, get a load of this brazen recruiting effort by a Sioux City church: “Pastors who join this effort are asked to commit to confront the injustice and ungodly decisions of the Iowa Supreme Court by boldly calling upon their flocks to ‘vote no on judicial retention’ for the three consecutive Sundays prior to Election Day.”  

President Barack Obama is discussing the economy this morning at a private home in Des Moines. Governor Chet Culver and several other elected Democrats are there, but the president isn’t doing any campaign rallies in Iowa like his appearance in Wisconsin yesterday.

The latest Des Moines Register statewide poll by Selzer and Co showed just 45 percent of all Iowa respondents approve of Obama’s performance, while 50 percent disapprove. Among the “likely voters” subset, Obama’s approval is 42 percent, with 55 percent disapproving.

Last night Obama tried to fire up a group of Democratic activists about this year’s election. Maybe Democrats would be more enthusiastic about voting and volunteering if the president had delivered on more of his campaign promises and implemented better economic policies. That’s a topic for another post.

I’ll update this post later with links on today’s event on the economy. Meanwhile, share any thoughts about Obama or his impact on the Iowa elections in this thread.

LATE UPDATE: The group of people invited for Obama’s backyard visit wasn’t representative of Iowans struggling in today’s economy. He spent a lot of time criticizing Republican ideology on tax cuts, mostly with accurate facts and figures. But I just don’t find Obama’s economic message credible. He seemed afraid to face the people hurt the most by the recession, and he won’t acknowledge or correct his administration’s inadequate response to the housing crisis and continuing high unemployment. Where is the president’s plan to help the “99ers,” people who have exhausted all their unemployment benefits but still can’t find work? Why did he reappoint a Federal Reserve chairman who won’t do much to attack the unemployment problem? Heads should have rolled at Treasury for designing a foreclosure response program primarily to benefit banks rather than Americans who are underwater on their mortgages. (See David Dayen’s “Portrait of HAMP failure” series at Firedoglake.)

Obama’s backyard event succeeded at what may have been its primary aim–generating positive vibes with Iowa journalists like Kathie Obradovich. She somehow concluded the staged performance helped “Obama reconnect with Iowa” by allowing “the president to interact with people in a way he never could in a huge venue.” Oh, and we’re supposed to be impressed he got a couple of semi-critical questions during the Potemkin visit.

Senator Chuck Grassley has a solid lead over Democrat Roxanne Conlin in the latest Iowa poll for the Des Moines Register. Among 550 likely voters Selzer and Co surveyed between September 19 and 22, 61 percent said they would vote for Grassley and just 30 percent for Conlin if the election were held today.  

More details from the poll, along with Grassley’s latest television commercials and other news from the race, can be found after the jump.

UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom for videos and transcripts of two new ads Grassley’s campaign released on September 27.

SEPTEMBER 28 UPDATE: The latest Iowa Senate poll by Republican pollster Rasmussen sees Grassley well ahead of Conlin, but by a 55 percent to 37 percent margin.

The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa poll shows Republican Terry Branstad leading Governor Chet Culver by 52 percent to 33 percent among likely voters. Selzer and Co surveyed 803 Iowa adults, of whom 550 were classified as likely Iowa voters, between September 19 and 22. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.2 percent.

I expected Branstad’s numbers to drop somewhat following the Republican primary, but his margin over Culver is almost exactly the same as the Register found the last time it polled this matchup in February. At that time Branstad led Culver 53-33, and Culver’s approval rating was 36 percent.

The new Selzer poll has no good news for Culver. His approval rating is 35 percent. Not only is Branstad polling above 50 percent, he leads “with voters from communities of all sizes, in all congressional districts and from all age groups and income levels.” No-party voters support Branstad by a 46 percent to 27 percent margin.

Culver’s campaign issued this statement on September 25:

“We believe that this poll serves as wake up call to Iowa voters,” said Governor Culver’s campaign manager, Donn Stanley. “When all is said and done, we believe that Iowans will ultimately choose Chet Culver, a leader who stands for Iowa values.

“The fact is,” Stanley continued, “all one has to do is look back as recently as Tom Vilsack’s race against Jim Ross Lightfoot in 1998 to see that this poll is not a harbinger of things to come. At this point in the race, Tom Vilsack was down a full 20 points in the Iowa Poll. I’m sure Governor Lightfoot would be happy to tell you the degree to which the Iowa Poll predicts the outcome of the race.”

That’s true, but Vilsack was not an incumbent with low approval ratings in a tough economy. Only 59 percent of likely voters said their minds were “firmly made up,” but I don’t know how Culver can convince the other 41 percent to give him another chance. It’s not as if no one ever heard of Branstad’s shortcomings:

Overall, 53 percent of likely voters say the candidate they are supporting is someone they can most easily tolerate, while only 36 percent say he is the best person for the job.

I hope the Culver campaign has budgeted well enough to stay up on television from now through election day. I doubt the Democratic Governors Association will spend any more money in Iowa this year.

UPDATE: More findings from the Register’s new poll are after the jump.

The conservative 501(c)4 organization American Future Fund commissioned polls last week in Iowa’s first, second and third Congressional districts. Yesterday the group released partial results from the surveys, touting the supposedly low re-elect numbers for Bruce Braley (IA-01), Dave Loebsack (IA-02) and Leonard Boswell (IA-03).

The topline results showed Democratic incumbents leading their challengers in all three races, even among the “certain to vote” sub-sample.

Coming off its worst week yet, Brad Zaun’s campaign is hyping a new poll showing him leading seven-term Representative Leonard Boswell by 51 percent to 41 percent in Iowa’s third district. The poll was commissioned by former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman’s American Action Forum, and taken by Republican pollster Ayres, McHenry & Associates. The poll was in the field from August 16 through 18, before a cascade of bad news for Zaun hit central Iowa newspapers, radio and television stations, and that’s not even the biggest problem with poll.

More details on the new Republican poll, as well as a preview of a Boswell campaign argument against Zaun, are after the jump.

It’s been months since we’ve had new public nonpartisan polling of Iowa general election matchups, but three Republican polls have come out in the last ten days. None of them hold good news for Iowa Democrats.

After the jump I summarize results from statewide polls done by Rasmussen Reports and Voter/Consumer Research for The Iowa Republican blog, as well as a Victory Enterprises poll of Iowa’s third Congressional district race.

Markos Moulitsas fired Research 2000 as the pollster retained by Daily Kos a few weeks ago after R2K fared poorly in “pollster ratings” compiled by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver. At the time I wondered whether Markos reacted a bit harshly, since Silver himself admitted, “The absolute difference in the pollster ratings is not very great.” In addition, some polling experts had raised questions about Silver’s rating system (see also here).

Today Markos published a remarkable analysis of “problems in plain sight” with Research 2000’s polling. Three researchers uncovered “extreme anomalies” in certain results and concluded, “We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls.” You should click over and read the whole thing, but here are the anomalies in question:

  1. A large set of number pairs which should be independent of each other in detail, yet almost always are either both even or both odd.

  2. A set of polls on separate groups which track each other far too closely, given the statistical uncertainties.

  3. The collection of week-to-week changes, in which one particular small change (zero) occurs far too rarely. This test is particularly valuable because the reports exhibit a property known to show up when people try to make up random sequences.

Markos has renounced “any post we’ve written based exclusively on Research 2000 polling” and asked polling sites to “remove any Research 2000 polls commissioned by us from their databases.”

Based on the report of the statisticians, it’s clear that we did not get what we paid for. We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don’t know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can’t trust it. Meanwhile, Research 2000 has refused to offer any explanation.

This analysis only covered R2K’s weekly national tracking polls for Daily Kos, but based on the findings I no longer have confidence in R2K’s state polling either, including various Iowa polls I’ve discussed at Bleeding Heartland. Some of those were commissioned by Daily Kos, and others were commissioned by KCCI-TV, the CBS affiliate in Des Moines.

Last year the Strategic Vision polling firm was brought down by convincing allegations that at least some of its polling results had been fabricated. Research 2000 had a much better reputation than Strategic Vision, though. Markos listed some of the news organizations that have commissioned R2K polls. I am seeking comment from KCCI News Director Dave Busiek about the company’s future plans regarding polls, and I’ll update this post when I hear back from him.

Share any relevant thoughts in this thread.

UPDATE: Daily Kos is suing Research 2000 for fraud, and R2K has issued a cease and desist letter to Silver’s blog FiveThirtyEight.com.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Mark Blumenthal contacted a forensic data guru for his take on the statistical anomalies. Excerpt:

[Walter] Mebane says he finds the evidence presented “convincing,” though whether the polls are “fradulent” as Kos claims “is unclear…Could be some kind of smoothing algorithm is being used, either smoothing over time or toward some prior distribution.”

When I asked about the specific patterns reported by Grebner, et. al., he replied:

   

None of these imply that no new data informed the numbers reported for each poll, but if there were new data for each poll the data seems to have been combined with some other information—which is not necessarily bad practice depending on the goal of the polling—and then jittered.

In other words, again, the strange patterns in the Research 2000 data suggest they were produced by some sort of weighting or statistical process, though it is unclear exactly what that process was.

JULY 4 UPDATE: Mark Blumenthal reviews what we know so far about this “troubling” story at Pollster.com.

Victory Enterprises, a consultant for Republican Brad Zaun’s Congressional campaign, conducted a poll showing Zaun leading incumbent Representative Leonard Boswell by 41 percent to 32 percent, with 27 percent undecided. The poll surveyed 400 “likely voters” in Iowa’s third district on June 17, producing a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent. The Des Moines Register’s Kathie Obradovich noticed some unusual features of the sample:

One thing to note is the party distribution: More Democrats (43 percent) than Republicans (38 percent) but only 19 percent independents.  As of the most recent Secretary of State report on voter registration, Democrats make up 38 percent of registered voters in the 3rd District; Republicans, 30 percent and no-party, 32 percent.

The campaign screened to include voters with a history of participating in off-year general elections. That’s why there are fewer independents. The Zaun campaign says they’re not as faithful about voting in off-year elections as registered party members. So these poll results are likely to look different from polls that allow for more participation from independents. It also puts a premium on Polk County voters, which the campaign says is based on history but is also where Zaun is by far the strongest.

No-party voters are less likely to turn out for off-year elections, but 19 percent sounds low. In 2006, about 26 percent of general election voters in Iowa were independents. I don’t know what that figure was in IA-03. Boswell’s campaign manager, Grant Woodard, cast doubt on the poll’s reliability:

“Internal polls created by hired political consultants are almost always bogus.  This “poll” is highly suspect – 30.3 percent heard of him but have no opinion and another 18.3% have never heard of him and have no opinion whatsoever.  In other words if nearly 50 percent of the participants don’t have an opinion on Sen. Zaun how could they come to this conclusion?  It isn’t worth the paper it is written on.   Clearly this “poll” was cooked up in order for Sen. Zaun to jumpstart his notoriously tepid fundraising.   We understand the games that they are trying to play.”

Obradovich posted the Zaun campaign’s defense of the poll here.

I would love to see an independent survey on this race, but public polls of Congressional districts are hard to come by. Zaun was campaigning actively around IA-03 all spring, as he faced a competitive Republican primary, so he may have gotten a bump. Boswell hasn’t kicked his re-election bid into gear yet. When he starts spending his war chest, we’ll get a better sense of how worried he is about Zaun. If Boswell goes negative on Zaun early, instead of talking primarily about his own record, that’s a sign his own internal polling is not encouraging.

Oddly, I agree with Krusty on Zaun’s weaknesses going into the general:

In Zaun, Boswell will face a tenacious campaigner, but also someone that couldn’t raise much money and has a 20-year record to pick apart.

There is no doubt that Zaun will try to make this campaign about the bailouts, Obamacare, and all of that, but Boswell is going to make this race to make this about agriculture and rural issues.

Zaun’s primary opponents said little about his record beyond criticizing his vote for an anti-bullying bill. Boswell’s campaign will probably educate third district voters about other aspects of Zaun’s record as state senator and mayor of Urbandale.