New USA Today/Gallup: Hillary - 45, Obama - 27, Edwards - 15

Democrats.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support rebounded somewhat despite several weeks' worth of less-than-good news from the campaign trail -- but isn't quite to where it was a month ago. Still, she's ahead by 18 percentage points. Sen. Barack Obama's poll number rose slightly.

• Clinton: 45%; vs. 39% two weeks ago and 48% two weeks before that.
• Obama: 27%; vs. 24% and 21% in the previous polls.
• John Edwards: 15%; unchanged from two weeks ago and up from 12% before that.
• Sen. Joseph Biden: 3%; vs. 4% and 2% in the previous polls.
• No other candidate was above 2% in the latest poll.

Each result from the survey of 399 "Republicans or Republican leaners" has a margin of error of +/- 5 percentage points. Each result from the survey of 513 "Democrats or Democratic leaners" also has a margin of error of +/- 5 percentage points.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2007/12/usatgallup-poll.html

Let's wait until some votes are cast, shall we?

http://www.pollingreport.com/wh04dem.htm

While 2008 is not 2004, your admonishment to wait for the voting to start is a wise one.

candiate is fairing across the u.s. Give me these polls and I will show you a national candidate and show you the next nominee and u.s.president....HRC is 44

which is why they constantly try to cram them down DU's throat as if they're evidence of something substantive.

that does not begin with small ground encounters but enables in any way broad media effect ever test a advantaged frontrunner- in time? Hillary would coast to the nomination if primary day was one day or if big states crowded the early field. A real test without an overtly conniving media supremacy would be potentiallty disastrous.

She's down to 45% now?

This must make her even more desperate!

~

Is politics such a mess in Oz?

I just saw my first Prime Minister election and it was pretty cool how the second choice votes worked out to give leads on the local level. Kevin Rudd was going to kick Howard's butt anyway about it but the preferential system was a delight to watch (sort of like Iowa).

The other thing I liked was how the new government started governing straight away. No time for mass pardons and thievery of keys on the White House computer boards.

Compulsory voting is also nice to see. People are proud of their vote here.

Very nice!

It's all a matter of statistics. An Iowa poll is far more predictive of who the nominee will be than a national poll, because of the primary system. That does not mean any poll is a crystal ball, it simply means that some polls are more predictive than others.

While they are useful in assessing current candidate strength, a poll taken last week may not mean much compared to a poll taken next week so their predictive value beyond a week before the polls is not much at all.

Also Iowa is probably the worst place to depend on polls because of the nature of the caucus.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/17/opinion/polls/main589167.shtml

Dean, 23%
Clark, 10%
Lieberman, 10%
Gephardt, 5%
Sharpton, 5%
Kerry, 4%
Edwards, 2%
Moseley-Braun, 1%
Dennis Kucinich, 1%
Don't Know, 28%

Now granted, Iowa and New Hampshire hadn't been moved up to January, and the Dean scream had not yet occurred. (Let's not forget, however, that Dean was on his way down before the "scream". He had finished third in Iowa, well below expectations, and was trying to fire up his supporters and let them know he was not going to give up without a fight.)

Also it would appear that there are fewer undecideds at this point in 2007, although a lot of support for the top 3 or 4 vote-getters is soft support which could change.

Still it's quite informative to see how quickly things can change.