I've made this point before, it deserves to be emphasized again and again. In looking ahead to 2008, everyone needs to remember how thoroughly the state of the race can be turned upside down by the results of the first couple of primaries/caucuses, especially Iowa and NH. Here is an excellent blog post by Mark Blumenthal that touches on this subject:
http://www.pollster.com/mystery_pollster/primary_polling_primer_timing.phpThe most dramatic thing in that post is this graph of the National Annenberg Election Study tracking poll:
which shows the national voter preferences for Dean, Edwards, and Kerry in 2003/2004 (the other candidates aren't shown). The Iowa and NH results reshuffled voter preferences in the rest of the country dramatically.
To quote from Blumenthal's post:
As Blumenthal goes on to point out, however, many early frontrunners have lost early primaries and come back to win. But still, one thing that everyone should be careful of is saying that "This is how the election will play out, unless something unexpected happens." **Every election** has something unexpected happening in the early primary states that shakes up the race considerably, though of course the frontrunner still tends to win more often than not.
