Even more questionable are Fox poll results on Palin. Both newest CNN and Wapo polls have palin at 13 and 16 respectively and Fox has her at 9?

Interesting. If skewing polls is designed to keep her in Fox stable of talking heads, is suppressing her popularity the right way to go?

They sure did. Their new D-side pollster spun off her firm from their old pollster, Opinion Dynamics.

Her firm is teamed with the Bush family's personal pollster from UT-Austin to represent the R side.

Their methodology is bogus, however. They make headlines here with a sample of just over 300 respondents for the GOP primary preferences. They also only plug you in to their poll at question #24, with no idea what came beforehand.

Republican votes know Romney and he has been a consistent frontrunner. Unless Rick Perry gets in and starts knocking people's socks off the nomination is Romney's to lose.

Only thing is, Perry was the only governor to have endorsed Giuliani in 2008 (which gives rise to one of my misgivings about Perry, actually). Also, Giuliani's law firm was the product of a deal with an old Texas firm looking to expand into New York and beyond. Giuliani and Perry seem as if they might be buddies. So Giuliani could actually endorse Perry, when Giuliani inevitably drops out (or decides not to run).

Handicapping political races is remarkably like handicapping horse races. The best horse racing handicappers in the world are seldom pick 3 out of 5 races correctly. I'm guessing political handicappers in during primary season aren't much better, but here it goes...

While it's impossible to predict with any certainty how any individual political campaign will go, I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where Perry doesn't eventually sew this thing up. But, that comes with the presumption that he won't fall all over himself between now and the first primary, which I suppose is possible.

However, Perry is a three-term governor of a gigantic state, so he must be a competent campaigner, right? Romney, who is Perry's only real competition, is - IMHO - too flawed and saddled with too much baggage to capture the nomination outright. It's impossible for him - perhaps even without Perry in the race - to gain the requisite number of delegates, especially when you consider the challenges Romney faces in our Southern states. Perry, OTOH, is likely to do reasonably well almost everywhere - save for perhaps the extreme Northeast.

Nope, the horses aren't even in the gate yet. But in the post parade, Perry looks fit & eager, Romney looks tired & wet and the rest of entrants look like this is the next stop before the glue factory. I would be surprised if Perry doesn't win, going away.

Me too. And it would be a very smart move. Never underestimate the "Sisterhood", especially with conservative women, who have been denied for too long. Most of the gains that conservatives have made since slick Willy are probably due to women wising up to the democrat sleaze.

"How can anybody seriously consider a psudoscience like polling..."

First, it's not pseudoscience, it's quite correctly called political science. Opinion polling employs well-tested and well-proven methods of statistical modeling. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, which is why every legitimate poll cites a "margin of error". There are PLENTY of other plainly scientific methods that also have margins of error.

Polling does not attempt to predict the future, although perhaps some people incorrectly try to apply polling that way. Polling does however, (reasonably) accurately measure the current political climate; In other words, "what is the public thinking right now". This tells the candidates, and the public, whose message is winning, today.

With respect to the polls that you have cited from 2008, you're citing those polls as if they happened in a vacuum or static environment. They didn't. They happened in a dynamic political environment. In that kind of an environment, things change - candidates make mistake, their records are scrutinized and/or they just fail to connect with voters. That doesn't mean that the polls were inaccurate or without merit.

Don't know much about Perry. The few times I've heard him speak, I wasn't duly impressed. He seems too conservative to carry the big diverse voting crowd that will come out in Nov. 2012. Not like last Nov. when mostly older, conservatives turned out. That's why we're seeing so much of Boehner and McConnell now.I'm independent leaning conservative but see no GOP candidate to get excited about.

You know, NRO has truly "arrived." An entire thread 90% of which is Dem trolls arguing with themselves over their party line on Perry. That tells you also that Perry scares the cranberries out of them.

Basic facts: Anyone who even slightly takes Pawlenty, Huntsman, or any of the truly second-tier candidates seriously at this stage is muddying the water or out of touch. Anyone who believes that the 3-times-elected Governor of the ONE state of 50 (not 57, Mr. President) that is growing jobs and the economy, even with no income taxes and a legislature that meets only every other year, even after absorbing a flood of Katrina victims from Louisiana and a flood of Federally-ignored illegals, drugs, and criminals from Mexico, and even with the same challenges that all the other states are enduring under the Obama kleptocracy...will have his political fate decided by an endorsement of Giuliani once upon a time is...well, naive is a nice way of putting it. And ANYone who believes that the massive wave of conservative and conservative-leaning-independent voters who swept the House into office last time will suddenly vaporize in a flood of "youth" and "minority" and other classic Dem fracture-coalition voters this time is...well, just plain wrong.

This will be an exciting, interesting primary season full of the usual ups, downs, and sidewayses, and polls will run the gamut, too. But at the end of the day when the Convention is over and the Obamanauts and their proxies have shot all their defamatory wads on every candidate--from headaches to halitosis and depleting their cash and credibility in the process--a serious, professional, economic conservative with solid roots in the electorate and powerful credentials to fix the only-gonna-get-worse Obama economy will emerge and be rallied around by everyone but a few Paul fringies and all seven people who think The Donald's hair looks good.

It is easy to see, hard to foresee, but from this moment in time, it is very, very likely that person will be Rick Perry. It is also clear that he can and will handily dismiss the inept, petulant, incompetent child currently giving Jimmy Carter a good name in the White House.