Dean Leading in Iowa
Yet another poll shows Howard Dean moving ahead of Dick Gephardt in Iowa.
Dean is just getting started with his late push for the Iowa caucuses. Since he’s opted out of public financing, his campaign can spend unlimited amounts of money on advertising in the state. Gephardt is limited to spending about a million dollars in Iowa.
And Dean is mobilizing an army of 5,000 Deanie weenies to stomp around Iowa dragging his supporters to the caucuses. When you consider that only about 100,000 people typically attend the caucuses, that’s a pretty significant effort.
The strongest anti-Dean now is not Gephardt or John Kerry. It’s Weasel Clark, who still has a chance of stopping Dean in the February 3 states, especially South Carolina. Clark will announce in January that his campaign has raised over $12 million this quarter. That’s more money than any Democrat has ever raised in a quarter, except for Dean. The announcement will instantly make Clark the Great Anti-Dean Hope.
UPDATE: The Note thinks February 3 may be too late to stop Dean:
The Note has long opposed the determinative “X-must-exceed-expectations in a particular state” standard, or asking candidates who don’t do well in New Hampshire only different variations of the same one question (“When are you getting out of the race?”).But having a waged a two-year campaign to get Ron Faucheux, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, David Yepsen, and every academic and political consultant under the sun to stop perpetuating this culture that deprives later-voting states from having a say in the determination of the major party nominees, we give up.
We vowed that if we couldn’t win this fight by December 1 of 2003, we would surrender — so this is our white flag.
So while “stopping” Howard Dean in Iowa is important to keeping him from the nomination, stopping him in New Hampshire is vital.
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