Obama’s Ground Game Makes Iowa Tough Turf For Romney
 President Barack Obama shakes hands with supporters Aug. 15 in Davenport, Iowa after a campaign stop.
1
inShare
share
Kyle Leighton October 24, 2012, 6:00 AM 10287 It’s Election Day in Iowa, and it has been for weeks.
Recent polling in the state shows Republican Mitt Romney quickly closing the gap in the presidential race, but that may be less and less important with every day that passes. Political watchers say President Obama has been successful this year at getting his supporters to take advantage of Iowa’s early voting system and that likely has given him a head start at a time when he still leads in the polls.
TPM Slideshow: PollTracker’s Top Races Of The 2012 Election
Pollster Ann Selzer, who runs the respected Des Moines Register survey, said there are signs that Iowans who have already cast a ballot are leaning heavily toward Obama.
“Two-to-one, people who say they have already voted are Barack Obama supporters,” Selzer told TPM. “The majority of people who plan to vote early are Barack Obama supporters. The majority of people who plan to vote on election day, Romney supporters. I think that’s what’s gets tricky — you have to have a huge margin on election day to offset the Democrats.”
Early voting in Iowa began on Sept. 27, and already nearly 520,000 people requested early ballots, according to elections officials. Of those, some 347,000 had filled out and returned them as of Oct. 22.
In 2008, a little more than 1.5 million people voted in Iowa and the state’s six electoral votes went to Obama by a solid 9.5 points. Few expect that sort of margin this time around, and polling throughout the summer suggested the state might be one of Romney’s best pick-up opportunities.
“I think that [Romney’s] early showing has a lot to do with there being a Republican caucus and nothing happening on the Democratic side,” Selzer said. “You had a lot of Republican messages in this state, a lot of ‘Fire Barack Obama’ messages. … So that had a lasting impact.”
As the summer faded, Obama started to tick up in the state in September and October, even though current polling has been mixed.
“The reason Obama became stronger is two things — first of all there are economic signals that things are getting better, and that became a little hard to ignore … and I think Obama has in place a stronger ground game, and that is starting to pick up,” Selzer said. “So all of the people that he had in place from four years ago, a lot of that infrastructure is still there. Romney sat out Iowa, really, and has chosen to have less presence in terms of a ground game … and in Iowa, with so much early voting, that ground game is really critical.”
And that could make all the difference in the state. Polls of late have been more cloudy — President Obama held a solid 8-point lead in a NBC News/Marist College poll released Thursday, but Romney was up 49 percent to Obama’s 48 percent in a survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling the day after. But among likely voters — a solid 34 percent of the NBC/Marist sample and 31 percent those polled by PPP — two-thirds had already cast their ballots for the president, with a third going for Romney.
Overall, the PollTracker Average of Iowa shows Obama with a small lead. |
