Many people seem to be impressed with the Romney showing in the Iowa Pay-To-Vote straw poll yesterday, but don't count me among them. When you look at the last ABC/WaPo poll for Iowa, you'll see that Romney led with 26% followed by Giuliani, Thompson, and the rest. But if you took that same poll and exclude the candidates who didn't participate (Fred Thompson, Gingrich, Giuliani, and McCain) you'll see that Romney gets 51% of the votes. That was a pretty realistic bar for him.
Now, add on top of that the fact that Romney has spent what some estimate to be 4-6 million dollars in Iowa, it seems pretty reasonable to expect him to do as well in a grass roots straw poll as he would in a poll by ABC news. But he didn't. In fact, the ABC poll had Huckabee with 8% and Brownback with 5%. Romney getting three times what Huckabee received would have been meeting expectations. To not even double Huckabee and barely double Brownback is embarassing. And to be fair, if you take the straw poll results and exclude the non-participants, Romney's number rises to 33%, still falling far short of the 51% he gets in polling.
One blogger has also suggested that Fred Thompson's number shows that his wave of support really isn't that. That's balderdash.
What I think is that this whole spectacle will thankfully never be played out again as candidates have decided to not give in to the blackmail of the Iowa Republican party. Yes, Fred Thompson, McCain and Giuliani supporters stayed home. What was the point of giving $25 to the Iowa Republican Party instead of giving it directly to your candidate? To me it shows common sense and wisdom, which used to be bedrock values of our party.
This election cycle is seeing a host of challenges to the conventional wisdom. That's what makes this primary the most exciting in my lifetime. In round one of those challenges, I think Romney's conventional wisdom fell flat and FDT, Rudy, and McCain are none the worse for running the alternate course, and much richer for it.
