I suspected that Republican Congressman Tom Latham’s internal polling must be showing a close race when he put up a negative tv ad on the bailout. Now the first public poll of Iowa’s fourth district is out. Research 2000 for Daily Kos found this:
Tom Latham 47
Becky Greenwald 42
undecided 11
Click the link for the internals.
Interestingly, the same poll found John McCain leading Barack Obama in the fourth district by 46 to 42 percent. Given the many polls showing Obama above the 50 percent mark in Iowa, I would have thought Obama would be leading McCain in this D+0 district.
If Greenwald is doing as well in IA-04 as Obama, then I feel really good about our chances for an upset in this district. Obama’s superior ground game could easily be worth several percentage points on election day.
Paging EMILY’s list and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee: please start spending some money on tv ads in this district! Greenwald has launched a good web ad recently, but she hasn’t been on tv for the past ten days or so.
EMILY’s List endorsed Greenwald last month, and the DCCC added her to Red to Blue in early October, but I am not aware of any independent expenditures on her behalf yet. (UPDATE: Supposedly the United Auto Workers just went up on the air with an anti-Latham radio ad, but I haven’t heard it and don’t have a transcript.)
Please donate to Greenwald if you can.
R2K did this poll, and while they’re generally decent, and while I’ve never crunched the numbers, I’ve always noticed quite a few of their polls appear to be outliers. No bias for or against Obama or Dems generally, the outliers can go either way, but they’re there. I can’t forget some months back R2K did a poll for local St. Louis media and had Obama with a 5-point lead when all other polls in that period had McCain with a clear lead.
I know all pollsters have their nutty results, so not to make too big a deal……
But McCain is NOT beating Obama in IA-04. And this poll makes me doubt the House poll, too. I doubt Greenwald is running even with Obama, unless people there think there really is such a groundswell. And Charlie Cook, Stu Rothenberg, and others would have picked up on that and made this a “lean” race already.
Finally, note that R2K simultaneously released a poll for Cedar Rapids local TV that has Obama up 54-39 statewide. No regional breakdown I’ve seen, but coming from the SAME pollster, a 15-point statewide lead directly contradicts a 4-point IA-04 deficit……the two are not reconcilable.