Zogby: Iowans, New Hampshirites angry but less focused on Iraq

Veteran pollster finds Huckabee and Romney neck and neck in Iowa, while Clinton's lead shrinks in the Granite State.

By David Cook | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 6, 2007 edition

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WASHINGTON - In Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first contests in the 2008 presidential election season will be held, voters are angry at government, but they are also less preoccupied with US policy in Iraq than in the recent past.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters in those two states are much more confident than are Republicans that their party will prevail in the '08 election.

Those are some conclusions from a new poll of likely caucusgoers in Iowa and likely primary voters in New Hampshire, released Wednesday by Zogby International, a polling and market-research firm based in Utica, NY.

In Iowa, both the Republican and Democratic races are essentially dead heats, said John Zogby, the firm's president and CEO, speaking Wednesday at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters. Candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are bunched at the top of the Democratic field, the Zogby telephone survey found. In the GOP race, former Govs. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are neck and neck.

In New Hampshire, Senator Clinton has lost ground but still holds an 11-point lead. On the Republican side, Mr. Romney retains a narrow edge over Mr. Huckabee. (Full poll results, including information on its margin of error, can be found at www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1395)

A key finding is that "the voters are extremely angry this year," Mr. Zogby said. "We see very high numbers there. [They are] angry at the political system. They are angry at Congress. They are angry at the president of the United States. That includes Democrats, sizable numbers of Democrats who are angry at Congress, and a sizable number of Republicans who are angry at the president."

Like other pollsters, Zogby is finding that voters have become somewhat less focused on the war in Iraq. A new USA Today-Gallup poll shows that the Iraq war still is the most frequently cited issue on voters' minds, but less so than in the past. Voters cite the Iraq war twice as often as they do the next issue. In April, they cited it three times more often than the second-place issue. The USA Today-Gallup poll found growing voter anxiety over the economy, healthcare, and immigration.

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