And lets talk about the aforementioned lack of surge in New voter registrations...
Simple facts.
In 2012 there were about 121,500 people who caucused as Republicans.
That is just shy of 20% of the registered republicans in IA (just over 600,000).
As of Thursday at least 3,000 people in Iowa had switched from democratic or no affiliation to republican.
IA allows same day registration and party re-affiliation for the caucuses.
The analysis then becomes quite subjective. Do we judge the 3k switches, and another 3k of new registrants against the 120k, or against the 600k? Most believe party changes are more likely to caucus, but new registrants are hard to judge in terms of commitment to actually vote.
And of course, we won’t know the same day registrations until caucus day.
Could 3 pct change the outcome? Romney lost by fewer votes than that.
In the end it will of course be about turn out. The Cruz team clearly knows this based on some of the recent ‘voter encouragement’ mailers. The Trump team knows this as well. Laudner rented extra space for the phone banks.
Conventional wisdom says the Cruz supporters come from the historically most reliable caucus blocks, so his support is in general considered rock solid. But conventional wisdom has yet to predict anything of substance in this race.
We will know soon enough.
When you have something of actual substance that would be of interest to people who care about this race please ping me. Real actual information, regardless of who would deem it good news, is what I seek.
You’re getting bogged down in the swamps. Trump COULD totally get a hundred thousand same-day registrants. But the point is not that Trump has already failed to draw people in. It’s simply that there is a dog that ain’t barking: We’re seeing weak data from the registration data we already have. And that suggests a lack of interest.