Don’t Listen To The Romneyites

Very quickly, let me say that any Romneyite spin you may be hearing that he now polls at 17% in Iowa is misleading because of the stupid methodology of the poll: there is an open-ended question (which is basically a prompt to name your preferred candidate), and a “forced-choice” question that artificially limited the field to the top six.  Romney scores 9.6% on the open-ended question among registered Republicans, and 17% on the “forced-choice” question.  In other words, when people are given the option of picking any candidate half of his “support” evaporates and moves to other candidates, leaving him more or less stuck at the 8-9% mark where’s he been for months.  Amusingly, in the “forced-choice” question, Obama pulls 11% of registered Republicans, and overall 27% of self-identified Republicans picked a Democratic candidate.  That means that, when forced to choose among the six, more Republicans in Iowa prefer a Democrat over any one of the Republican Terrible Trio.   

Update: Okay, I jumped the gun a bit.  The numbers most people are talking about are the likely caucus-goer numbers, which also happen to put Romney at just about 17%.  That may be more significant, but the underlying lack of support among Republican voters for Republican candidates cannot be considered a good sign for any of the GOP contenders.