Richardson Moves Ahead of Obama in Iowa

The Richardson campaign sent an email out this afternoon with this surprising bit of information from internal polling they have done...

The Governor has rocketed up 10% among likely Iowa caucus goers in just three months, and now stands at 13%. No other Democratic candidate has made gains anywhere close to that over the same time period. In fact, amongst the likeliest caucus goers (those who attended the 2004 caucuses, voted in the 2006 primary and are definite to attend next year's caucus) the Governor has overtaken Senator Obama for 3rd place.

Richardson has been moving for the past few months in Iowa. It just shows what a couple million dollar of good, creative TV ads can do.

What is surprising about this, however, is that Obama's numbers are falling in Iowa. He has been traveling the state, doing smaller events, yet he isn't moving up in the polls.

The Richardson campaign is also saying they will outraise John Edwards this quarter. If they do and if they are ahead of Obama in Iowa, I think it would mark that Richardson has officially entered the 2nd-tier and is knocking on the door of first-tier status.

**Update**
The Richardson campaign sent out another email this afternoon with more information on their internal poll.

The poll of 500 likely Iowa caucus-goers was conducted for the Richardson campaign by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin and Associates June 18-20 and has a margin of error of + 4.4%.

Governor Richardson is now solidly in double-digits in both Iowa and New Hampshire . A CNN-WMUR TV poll following the June 3 debate had the Governor at 10%, as did last month's poll published in the Des Moines Register.

Here are the results to the question "If the caucuses were held today, who would you support?" (likely caucus-goers)

John Edwards	34%
Hillary Clinton	24%
Barack Obama	17%
Bill Richardson	13%
Joe Biden	2%
Dennis Kucinich	2%
Chris Dodd	0%
Other	1%
Don't Know/NA	8%

Here are the results to the same question, broken out among "likeliest" caucus-goers (representing just over 40% of the sample - voters who attended the 2004 caucuses, voted in the 2006 primary, and say they are definite to attend next year's caucus):

John Edwards	31%
Hillary Clinton	23%
Bill Richardson	18%
Barack Obama	16%
Joe Biden	3%
Dennis Kucinich	2%
Chris Dodd	0%
Other	1%
Don't Know/NA	8%