To answer Larison a bit more directly: right now, I’d almost completely ignore the polls. I’d pay attention to high-profile endorsements, fundraising success, and any other signs of party support — success in signing up prominent staffers, for example. I’d also pay a lot of attention to anti-endorsements: any strong statements by important GOP leaders that a candidate or a candidate’s issue positions are unacceptable (or just the fact of unacceptable issue positions; that’s why Hunstman isn’t, in my view, a plausible nominee). ~Jonathan Bernstein

Bernstein was answering the question I asked at the end of this post from yesterday. This is a fair point. In June 2007, Huckabee was widely considered a marginal candidate and was not polling very well anywhere, and seven months later he was winning Iowa. Having said that, the division of the field into the “serious” contenders (i.e., Romney, Pawlenty, and Huntsman) and the also-rans at this point seems mostly arbitrary. If polls are largely meaningless, and I’ll grant that they are, why are some of the first-time candidates being taken any more seriously than the “fringe” or marginal candidates? On the basis of past fundraising success, for example, wouldn’t we have to acknowledge that Paul and Bachmann have proved that they can raise large amounts fairly quickly, and that Pawlenty has not done very well?

To make the question more specific: why are Pawlenty and Huntsman frequently referred to and treated as “main contenders” when Huntsman clearly isn’t and Pawlenty hasn’t shown that he is? The answer to that is that the rest of the field has been pre-judged as unacceptable to party elites for reasons of ideology or electability, but that’s not a very satisfying answer. Economic conservative activists declared Huckabee persona non grata early on, but it didn’t keep him from winning several contests and being competitive in a few others. McCain received almost nothing but “anti-endorsements” from many party and movement leaders, but these didn’t have that much of an effect. As I was just saying, the party elites’ declarations don’t carry nearly as much weight with primary voters as many seem to believe, and often enough the very things that make the rest of the field unacceptable to party and movement leaders are the things that make them popular with rank-and-file voters.