Each of the top three Democratic presidential candidates Tuesday touted polls that showed them ahead in Iowa, underscoring the unpredictability of Thursday’s first-in-the-nation contest.
Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama were essentially locked in a three-way tie heading into the Iowa caucuses. Although Clinton and Obama have received the lion’s share of media attention, there were signs that Edwards was poised for a strong finish.
“We feel very, very confident that things are moving in our direction because of the calls we do each night,” said Edwards campaign manager David Bonior. “We do thousands of calls on undecideds. We ask them where they’re going. And over the last three, four, five days, they’ve been moving in great numbers towards us — a much more steep climb than Senators Clinton or Obama.”
Even Ralph Nader, whose independent presidential bid in 2000 was blamed by many Democrats for the defeat of Al Gore, threw his support behind Edwards.
Bonior trumpeted a poll by MSNBC and McClatchy newspapers that showed the former North Carolina senator garnering the support of 24 percent ofIowa Democrats. That’s 1 percent ahead of Clinton and 2 percent ahead of Obama, but well within the poll’s five-point margin of error.
Meanwhile, Obama supporters were heartened by a Des Moines Register poll showing the Illinois senator leading Clinton by a spread of 32 to 25 percent, with Edwards at 24. The poll’s margin of error was 3.5 points.
“It makes the campaign feel great, but we know the only poll that counts is going to be Thursday night, the night of the caucuses,” Obama supporter Gordon Fischer, former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, told MSNBC.
Obama sounded confident.
“We stand on the brink of doing something very, very special right here in Iowa,” he told an enthusiastic crowd at a campaign rally in Des Moines.
Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, dismissed the Register poll and cited polls by CNN and Reuters showing Clinton leading Obama by two and four percentage points, respectively.
At a campaign stop in Ames, Iowa, Clinton predicted that history will “judge the Bush administration harshly.” She even jokingly blamed the administration for an audio problem she experienced on the stump a day earlier.
“I was going on and on about something concerning President Bush and the microphone just died,” she deadpanned. “And I thought, ‘I know they’re a little obsessed with me, but this is getting absurd.’ ”
