The people interviewed still saw Perry as the frontrunner, although noting that he was slipping. He’s followed in the rankings by Ron Paul and Mitt Romney.
Bachmann hasn’t been able to convince any of her colleagues, even in the Tea Party caucus, to support her presidential bid.
Bachmann’s new communications director in Iowa, Eric Woolson, has formerly worked for Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty.
As the first in the nation caucus approaches, a panel of experts from the state to our south rank the Republican candidates for president.
Mitt Romney said Rick Perry’s rhetoric on Social Security was “over-the-top, unnecessary and frightening to people.”
Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney all achieve roughly equal results against Barack Obama in a new Gallup poll of registered voters. When respondents were asked to choose between Obama and one of these four GOP presidential candidates, Romney fared the best, with 48 percent of registered voters saying they would vote for him against Obama. But the difference between his result and the result of Bachmann and Paul, the two candidates who placed first and second in the Ames Straw Poll, was within the poll’s margin of error.
“That [Michele] Bachmann and [Ron] Paul finished at the top in the straw poll, it certainly seems to give a boost to the status of the tea party and its issues, but that doesn’t really result in the notion that some combination of social conservatives and tea party activists have taken over the Republican party (in Iowa),” says Tim Hagle, a political scientist and Republican pundit at the University of Iowa.
The ad will run statewide in Iowa starting Wednesday.
With only a few weeks to go before several 2012 candidates face off in the Ames Straw Poll, the world is about to see who has best balanced the game of Iowa momentum and expectations.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has raised almost a quarter of his campaign funds from Minnesotans. His $4.45 million in contributions puts him well below Mitt Romney, whose total haul for this election cycle is $18.3 million.
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