Parsing the polls: Why a Klobuchar surge would be unsurprising

Amy Klobuchar is making a mad dash in the home stretch of the Iowa caucuses if the latest Emerson College poll is accurate. I, and other reporters, would be unsurprised if this surge is real.

That survey shows Klobuchar in third place, having gained 3 percentage points since December and having passed former Iowa front-runners Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. If Warren or Buttigieg finished fourth or fifth in Iowa, that could mean instant death for them.

The average reader may be surprised by this Klobucharge, but very few political reporters are. It’s been a constant source of irritation to commentators on the Left (see here and here for two examples) that the political press have repeatedly suggested Klobuchar has some underlying strength.

Now, to be sure, one poll doesn’t prove anything. And this Emerson poll should be read with two grains of salt: The margin of error is 4.6 percentage points, and the latest Suffolk poll, over the same period, shows Klobuchar down at 6% and in fifth place, consistent with earlier polls.

But on my recent trips to Iowa, I found that basically every Democrat I spoke to loved Klobuchar. (That said, I didn’t visit any Bernie Sanders outposts.) A Monmouth poll from earlier this month showed Klobuchar with the lowest unfavorable of all the candidates. A December CNN focus group found widespread praise for Klobuchar’s debate performance.

Klobuchar is from Minnesota, which borders Iowa. She has consistently shown herself to be reasonable in circumstances where other Democrats are clearly disingenuous, extreme, and untethered by facts, such as Democratic debates and the Senate Judiciary hearings about Brett Kavanaugh. That Midwestern, practical, and centrist stance is the perfect formula for media love. But it’s also appealing to the average Iowa Democrat.

The Iowa voters I spoke with consistently said they liked Klobuchar but weren’t seriously considering caucusing for her because she was so low in the polls — she consistently posted single digits in Iowa and low single digits elsewhere. This is exactly what I heard about Barack Obama about two months before the caucuses in 2008 — I like him, but he can’t win. We all heard about Rick Santorum a few weeks before the GOP caucuses in 2012. It’s a recipe for a late surge because it can be self-reinforcing. Once a candidate such as that climbs into third place, lots of those other Amy-likers will abandon the other candidates and get on board with Klobuchar.

Again, until we see another poll with her in double digits and out of fifth place, it would be premature to predict a Klobucharge, but it wouldn’t shock me a bit.