Pundits have been wondering about the Huckabee surge. He came out of nowhere! He’s way past Romney! Iowans have fallen in love with the Huckster! How could he be so high in the polls?
Maybe he isn’t really. I have a theory, backed up only by intuition. That is this: when people are asked to take part in a poll, especially if the poll is not between only two choices, people will sometimes answer the poll in such a way as to get across a more complex message than the poll is designed to take in.
For example, the Huckabee result: I think it is not so much that Iowans love Huckabee but that they are sensing that the choices are narrowing to two, Giuliani and Romney. They don’t like parts of Giuliani’s past - there are wearisome Clintonian echoes in his personal life. Romney’s leadership qualities don’t seem as strong and some are uneasy about his religion. A lot of people like Fred but his campaign is not catching fire.
Keep in mind what a test-happy society we are. People take many multiple-choice standardized tests. After a while you learn how the questions and answers are written. You begin to figure out what answers are expected. Is it too far-fetched to think that Iowans being polled, wanting to get across their points of view, could sometimes be answering the questions in such a way as to get across a more complex view than is being asked about in the poll? And the more questions a poll has, the more chances the respondent has of answering in such a way as to shape an answer deliberately that either fits a script or flies in the face of the script that is apparently being offered by the polling firm.
I think Iowa voters giving Huckabee those high ratings are not so enchanted with Huckabee. They are just giving a high rating to those qualities that they perceive that he has that Giuliani and Romney don’t have. The high poll numbers for Huckabee, in my opinion, are the Iowa public’s way of saying, “We want to make it clear to the other two guys that we aren’t sold on either of them.”
Why would people do that?
They don’t like having pre-anointed candidates presented to them. They wish to say, “Yes, we know this or that one is supposed to be inevitable and that other one is supposed to be the upstart challenger, but we aren’t interested in your media-written storylines.”
They may not feel that they have much of a voice, so when a poll-taker contacts them, they know that poll will be on the news. Hard to resist joining in on that.
I say, good for the people of Iowa. They are saying to Romney and Giuliani that they have work to do to win over the people. They are saying to the the polling firms that they, Iowans, won’t go by the script. This is a good messages. I hope the candidates are hearing it.