The Des Moines Register Iowa Poll is out at 8 pm ET.
Four years ago, as recounted by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe in The Audacity to Win: “Back at the office, our press staff kept refreshing the Register website. The Register poll never, ever leaks — which is very rare with polls — nor does the paper’s staff send it out to the campaigns a few minutes before they post it on their site. Everyone gets the results at the same time. I was told later that throughout the evening hundreds of thousands of people across the country were frantically hitting refresh on their browsers to update the Des Moines Register website.”
Meanwhile, Yahoo News interviews Ann Selzer, the woman behind the poll, and notes “the outsize attention paid to the paper’s poll findings is in direct
proportion to the accuracy it has had in foreshadowing the actual caucus
results in elections past.”
