The 88th General Assembly
has convened the 2012 fiscal session

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Report from Iowa ahead of tomorrow's caucuses

The Arkansas Times, the Clinton School Blog, and Blake's Think Tank all have folks on the ground in Iowa, so I thought I at least needed one report from the Hawkeye state. The best I can come up with, though, is an unattributed source since my guy up there is an Obama supporter and that's the policy of the Illinois senator's campaign. To wit:
I went to another Obama rally last night, this one in Ames. A crowd of about 500 completely filled the room. Obama was introduced by Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania. He is 34, won a predominantly Republican seat and served in Iraq. He believes Obama is the guy to be "Commander in Chief" as he stated several times.

The crowd was pumped because of the new Des Moines Register poll showing Obama with a lead at 32%. Still, I don't get the feeling that Iowans watch the polls. There are two groups of people here. The ones that are committed and working for their candidate and a sizeable group that is leaning but still unwilling to commit. I am not sure what they are waiting for to make a decision but I would guess that 20-30% of the people that will caucus still view themselves as uncommitted. I don't know about the other campaigns but Obama is trying to identify those people and contact.

All the campaigns probably want to knock on doors these last days. Keep in mind, the temperature is in the teens and the wind chill puts it down to around, well, zero.
For the record, I'm going with a close Clinton win over Obama (2nd) and Edwards (3rd) on the Democratic side. For the Republicans, I think Huckabee will come in first with Romney 2nd, Paul 3rd, and McCain 4th.