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George Will and the Ames Straw Poll “Circus”

Even when the straw poll and the caucuses haven’t predicted the nominee, they have played a large role in shaping the outcome in recent years. ~Jim Antle Antle is right that the Ames straw poll has sometimes had a significant role in determining the shape of past nomination contests, but George Will wouldn’t dispute that […]

Even when the straw poll and the caucuses haven’t predicted the nominee, they have played a large role in shaping the outcome in recent years. ~Jim Antle

Antle is right that the Ames straw poll has sometimes had a significant role in determining the shape of past nomination contests, but George Will wouldn’t dispute that point. The straw poll has a disproportionate effect on the field of candidates, and Will finds the entire exercise to be absurd. Will’s complaint is that the straw poll shouldn’t have the influence that it does. He seems especially annoyed that the straw poll will probably doom Pawlenty’s campaign:

If Paul and Bachmann, in either order, capture the two top spots, Pawlenty’s campaign may be mortally wounded. If another candidate propelled by an intense faction — former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a favorite of evangelicals who in 2008 were 60 percent of Republican caucus participants — also finishes ahead of Pawlenty, the Ames circus will have destroyed the only one among the six candidates who bought space — and therefore are permitted to speak — at the event who has a realistic chance to be nominated and defeat Barack Obama.

When the “circus” produces acceptably boring results as it did in 1999 and 2007, when Bush and Romney respectively won, there are not many complaints about its circus-like nature. In those cases, it was treated as a test of campaign organization and enthusiasm for the candidate. This year, Pawlenty reportedly has the best campaign organization in Iowa, but he has so far been notoriously bad at inspiring enthusiasm. It remains to be seen if his organization can get very many people to support the candidate.

Pawlenty is the last of Will’s “plausible” candidates, and it is no good for Will’s assumptions about the presidential election when the last candidate still deemed “plausible” proves to be a flop. This should alert us to some serious problems with the criteria Will and many others have been using to assess the “plausibility” of various Republican candidates. Pawlenty was treated as a “plausible” candidate from the moment he began preparing for a run, and as soon as he formed his exploratory committee he was given default major candidate status. He never earned this status, and has mostly managed to lose it after just a few months. If the Ames straw poll hastens the end of his campaign, it will do him and the rest of us a great favor by putting an end to the charade. After all, if Pawlenty can barely get out of the gates without faltering, how “realistic” was it to expect that he had a chance at the nomination?

What is stranger still is the argument Will uses against the curious GOP straw poll practice:

In 2011, a purchased, or at least rented, small portion of the nominating electorate of the state that ranks 30th in population can profoundly influence the coming political choices of voters in the 49 other states.

Will’s argument could just as easily be made against the Iowa caucuses, in which a fairly small number of activists will even more profoundly influence the political choices of the rest of us. Iowa is an unrepresentative, small state, but it has a hugely disproportionate influence over the nomination process for both parties. Its influence is not usually as decisive in the GOP contest as South Carolina has been in recent cycles, but it is significant all the same as part of the winnowing process. The Ames straw poll simply adds another hurdle for candidates to clear before they can be considered competitive in Iowa. What seems to bother Will about the poll this time is that the winnowing process may not yield what he considers an acceptable result.

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