海角大神

Polling presidential races more than two years before Election Day is, as I鈥檝e noted several times in the past, usually not nearly as important as the media organizations that publicize the polls make them out to be. Nobody has actually entered the presidential race on either side of the ticket, many of the potential candidates are people that, notwithstanding their constant appearances on cable news networks, are largely unknown to voters on the ground, and there鈥檚 been virtually no real campaigning of any kind. That being said, polling that is conducted this early is instructive to the extent that it reveals what the kind of voters may be heading to the polls, or the caucus locations, once the primaries actually start in early 2016. For that reason, a new CNN/ORC poll that shows former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee leading the prospectively Republican field tells us much about the voters who will decide who wins the first contest of the cycle:

Mr. Huckabee, of course, won the 2008 Iowa caucuses by more than 10,000 votes, a victory that for a short time propelled him into the ranks of top tier candidates in the GOP field, although that quickly ended when he was unable to parlay his victory in Iowa into success in South Carolina or any other state quickly enough to stop the John McCain juggernaut. For a time, the former Arkansas governor was at or near the top of polling in advance of the 2012 presidential election until he ultimately decided not to run, in no small part it seemed at the time because he was rather enjoying the radio show and weekend Fox News Channel show he had at the time. While it鈥檚 been nearly eight years now since Huckabee ran for public office, and even longer since he last held public office, polling like this indicates that he still holds some sway with the evangelical 海角大神s in Iowa that propelled him to victory in the caucuses, and that these voters will likely have much to say about who ends up coming out of Iowa with the 鈥渇irst in the nation鈥� victory.

If nothing else, this is yet another reason why it is fundamentally absurd for the presidential election process to start in Iowa, especially given the way that they conduct elections. Iowa is about as unrepresentative of the nation as a whole as you can get, for example. According to the 2010 census, the population of the state is 91.3 percent white, 2.9 percent African-American, 1.9 percent Asian, with the remaining 3.9 percent being divided among a number of different ethnic groups. No doubt, the Republican electorate in Iowa is even more white than the Republican electorate nationally. The state is also not representative of the nation as a whole when it comes to income, level of education, or professions. Nonetheless, this is the state that, along with New Hampshire, is given priority by both parties in the primary process and which has been known to end a presidential campaign before it started. Indeed, there hasn鈥檛 been a person elected president in recent memory who has not won either the Iowa caucus or the New Hampshire primary, if not both. Unlike New Hampshire, though, Iowa utilizes an election process that seems designed to make the result even more unrepresentative than it would be under a primary:

So, no, this poll showing Mike Huckabee leading among Republicans in Iowa doesn鈥檛 necessarily show that he鈥檇 be a strong candidate in 2016, assuming he even ran, which seems unlikely at this point. What it does show is how absurd it is that we are starting our presidential nomination process in an absurdly unrepresentative state like Iowa using an electoral process that seems better suited to picking a Homecoming king and queen at the local high school than a president of the United States.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at 丑迟迟辫://飞飞飞.辞耻迟蝉颈诲别迟丑别产别濒迟飞补测.肠辞尘/听