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Conventional Pundit Wisdom Fail (Again)? Scott Walker Surging

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I’ve often noted that the conventional wisdom surfaces with a loud WHOOSH!, whipping across old and new media. It’s touted and repeated by pundits because this is the age of instant analysis (you do your best to predict and say it as if you really know it’ll happen). And then if if the conventional wisdom is wrong, it is quietly, sheepishly swept under the rug in the hopes no one will notice that the pundists (with perhaps the exception of Larry Sabato) were wrong. Are we seeing this again? Or will this spark a new conventional wisdom that dies a quiet, unacknowledged death?

Immediately after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s announcement that he wouldn’t run for President for a third time, the conventional wisdom was that this would make former Florida Governor Jeb Bush the front runner for the 2016 Presidential nomination. That makes sense — except a new poll out of Iowa finds Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker surging:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is surging, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is an also-ran and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is dominating in a new poll of Iowans likely to vote in the nation’s first presidential nominating contest.

The Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, taken Monday through Thursday, shows Walker leading a wide-open Republican race with 15 percent, up from just 4 percent in the same poll in October. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was at 14 percent and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, stood at 10 percent.

Bush trailed with 8 percent and increasingly is viewed negatively by likely Republican caucus-goers. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is in even worse shape, with support from just 4 percent. More troubling for Christie: He’s viewed unfavorably by 54 percent, among the highest negative ratings in the potential field. At 9 percent, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson pulls more support than either Bush or Christie.

Question: is a poll in Iowa indicative of how it is or will be nationally? Or is it only the pulse-rate of Iowa, which won’t be the same as the national GOP pulse-rate?

The poll perhaps suggests:

  • If Jeb Bush wants to win Iowa he’s going to have to move further to the right which, as in the case of Romney, could damage him as a fliip flopper and alienate some voters he’d need in a general election.
  • A thirst for new political faces.
  • A willingness for Iowa voters to turn to an aggressive conservative who doesn’t talk like he’s auditioning for fill in host for Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.
  • Perhaps a re-run of the 2012 Anyone But Mitt Movement where many primary voters were looking for anyone other than Romney to head their ticket but in the had no choice but to accept him as the GOP nominee (which didn’t mean they all went out to vote for him.
  • Walker will come under fire from the ascending Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
  • Walker is about to have a much tougher time with the media: he’l have to answer questions on foreign policy, and will find himself challenged. More profiles of him will run using whatever has been published before plus any new information — because the media’s job is indeed to scrutinize (which partisans on both side agree if a not totally complimentary profile is done on another party’s candidate but denounced as a biased hit piece when aimed at their party’s candidate).

    • Paul didn’t waste any time giving it to Bush over Bush’s drug usage as a student versus Bush’s position on drugs today:

    Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) accused Jeb Bush of hypocrisy after The Boston Globe reported the former Florida governor was a heavy marijuana smoker while at an elite prep school.

    Bush opposed a Florida medical marijuana ballot initiative last year even though he partook liberally of the herb while in high school.

    “You would think he’d have a little more understanding then,” Paul told The Hill while en route to a political event in Texas.

    “He was even opposed to medical marijuana,” Paul said of Bush, a potential rival in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. “This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana but he wants to put people in jail who do.

    “I think that’s the real hypocrisy, is that people on our side, which include a lot of people who made mistakes growing up, admit their mistakes but now still want to put people in jail for that,” he said.

    “Had he been caught at Andover, he’d have never been governor, he’d probably never have a chance to run for the presidency,” he added.

    Bush told The Globe in a recent interview about his four years at Phillips Academy in Andover, one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools, “I drank and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” explaining the behavior was “pretty common.”

    This latest poll already makes this Washington Post piece a bit out of date, unless the iowa poll discounted.

    Mitt Romney’s decision to forgo a third try at the White House has settled the question of whether the 2016 GOP presidential field has a front-runner — bestowing a coveted status on former Florida governor Jeb Bush that also raises new challenges and perils.

    Republicans have a tradition of picking an anointed one early. That establishment candidate almost always ends up with the nomination, although not without a fight and some speed bumps along the way.

    But this is a particularly unsettled time for the party. It is struggling to define its identity amid open warfare among its various factions. And there are a raft of fresh and potentially appealing faces emerging on the scene, comprising what many Republicans believe could be the strongest undercard of early-bout contenders in decades.

    Losing Romney as a rival is “a mixed bag for Bush,” said veteran GOP strategist Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican party. “He also becomes the target of everyone who is anti-establishment. Before, you had Romney and Bush kind of splitting up that ire.”

    Bush was already assembling a formidable army of fundraisers and talented operatives, including poaching Romney’s top Iowa strategist, David Kochel, to be his national campaign manager.

    That process appeared to intensify after the 2012 GOP presidential nominee bowed out on Friday.

    Journalistic hedge words are used for a reason: it makes an analysis hold up longer. It might be wise for new and old media to use some of them this early in the political season. Or..not?

    (That’s a hedge).

    Meanwhile, on Twitter: