As I mentioned in a recent post, Public Policy Polling just released their polling data from Iowa with an unheard of 250 pages of crosstabs.

As I delve into them it’s becoming fairly obvious to me that the single most important contention that Ron Paul supporters can make to Iowans is that Ron Paul is electable. With some reasonable assumptions and observations, I think the case is so strong that if I were advising the campaign that would be the focus of all of the media and mass mailing efforts in the upcoming weeks before the caucus.

1. Ron Paul is winning among voters who say that the issues are more important than electability and well behind among those who say the opposite.

This argument is very straight forward and is basically just reading the crosstab.

Ron Paul is 28 points behind Gingrich among voters who say that a candidate’s ability to beat Obama is more important than their issue positions and 3 points ahead of him among voters who say the opposite. Likewise, Paul is 7 points behind Romney and 9 points ahead of him of respectively.

2. More of Ron Paul’s base of support is comprised of people who care about issues over electability than any candidate but Huntsman.

This is the exact same set of data just broken down percentage wise the opposite way. However, it is informative to look at because it allows you to see the impact of the fact that more people care about issues than electability, by a count of 57% to 34%, and compare the the differences among each candidates supporters irregardless of their overall level of support.

Click on the chart for a larger version

3. Among those who think that Ron Paul is the most electable, virtually all of them support him.

87% of those likely caucus attendees who believe Ron Paul is the most electable support him. That’s more than any other candidate.

Click on the chart for a larger version

Considering that in polling data, even things you might expect to have a 100% correlation often don’t, it gets that much closer to all of them. For example, only 97% of people planning on voting for Paul have a favorable view of him.

4. Almost the entirety of the base of support of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney believe they are the most electable.

For both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, 84% of their supporters believe that they are the most electable.

Click on the chart for a larger version

This is the most important observation from all of the crosstabs. Keep in mind that not only do 84% of Gingrich and Romney supporters believe their candidate is the most electable, but the only other significant faction of supporters believe the other one is the most electable. 7% of Gingrich supporters believe Romney is the most electable and 5% of Romney supporters think it’s Gingrich. Factor in those who answered “Someone else/ Not sure” and every other response basically amounts to a rounding error in the poll.

Conventional wisdom from political pundits is that Mitt Romney or Jon Hunts is clearly the most electable candidate. For 84% of Gingrich supporters to believe that he is the candidate most able to beat Obama is a rather unexpected result.

5. The candidate that voters think is the most electable is a very powerful predictor of who they support.

If we for a moment exclude the roughly 17.5% of voters who responded “Someone else/Not sure” to the questions asking who they planned to vote for during the caucus, 7%, or who they thought was most electable, 14% (remember to subtract out the 3.5% of voters who answer that way for both questions when you add them together), nearly 69% of voters are planning on caucusing for the candidate they believe to be most likely to beat Obama.

From Ron Paul’s perspective this gets even better because such a low percentage of his supporters believe he isn’t the most electable candidate. About 8% of total voters and slightly less than 10% of voters in our adjusted sample fall into this category.

Conclusions

I didn’t make the case here, but a combination of the data from argument #1 in this post and the crosstab I discussed in my last post makes a pretty convincing case that Ron Paul is winning on the issues. Unless I’m going crazy, the reason Ron Paul is losing by 17 points to Gingrich among voters who care most about “Government spending, reducing the deficit” can’t be because that many voters actually think Gingrich has better policy positions on the issue than Ron Paul’s proposal to cut $1 trillion in spending in the first year. A substantial part of that has to be electability, as the other polling numbers strongly suggest.

The missing piece of data is some better of measure of electability perception other than asking voters who they believe is the most electable. Just asking voters who they think is the most electable tells us something, but knowing polling data with a metric of how many voters think each candidate would beat Obama in a general election match-up would be incredibly helpful. Perhaps best of all would be a poll that asked voters what they thought the percent chance that each candidate would be the nominee.

Another helpful piece of data would be another version of the question asking whether the issues or electability was most important to voters with more options for answers. Perhaps a 5 answer spectrum of answers ranging between “almost entirely issues/electability” with “mostly issues/electability but issues/electability is also a factor” and “about an equal mixture of each” in the middle.

While the polling data out there on a hypothetical Paul vs. Obama match-up isn’t anywhere close to as extensive as that for Romney or Gingrich – there were only 2 such polls matching Paul and Obama done in November in the Real Clear Politics listing and 11 such polls featuring Romney – there is evidence to look at, most notably the NBC News / Marist poll (pdf) showing that, in Iowa, Paul ties Obama while Romney was 9 points behind and Gingrich 10. An argument can certainly be made that Iowa is the state where voters are paying the most attention and thus best simulates the climate of the general election.