Peter D. Hart, the respected Democratic pollster who has perfected his trade through his work in the past 15 presidential campaigns, candidly warns against the predictive value of polls taken this far ahead of any presidential election. At this stage, so long before voters actually vote, according to Hart, poll numbers are “written in wet sand at the ocean’s edge.”
History backs Hart up. In 2003, the year before the re-election race of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush, leading in the polls for the opposition party’s nomination was then-Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who skipped the Iowa caucuses to concentrate on the New Hampshire primary, in which he finished a distant fifth, and then, after not having won a single delegate in any of the first eight contests, withdrew. CONT.
Mark Shields