Excerpt:

Chris has a good post up about some of the issues in recent 2008 polling for Iowa. I’ve expressed skepticism before, but I thought I’d add a little about American Research Group, the organization that apparently thinks Hillary Clinton is the caucus frontrunner.

ARG is based out of New Hampshire, and has done work for Republican candidates before. As recently as 2004 they refused to name who was paying for their polling; I don’t know if they have been asked about this latest effort. One of my friends in New Hampshire’s first words about them were “something something Republican hacks.”

They don’t list any past results on their website, which is a pretty good sign that they aren’t all that proud of them. In 2004 they did a lot of state polling, and seemed to be less accurate than average, ranking in the lower half for both overall and battleground polling according to Real Clear Politics. Their bread and butter polling of the New Hampshire primary has been almost hilariously bad - They got the winner wrong in 1996 and 2000, and were off by twenty points in the McCain/Bush race.

And for good measure, they aren’t all that great in Democratic primaries either.

So ARG sucks and their polling is crap. Just puttin’ it out there.

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