I wanted to pick up on John's post about New Hampshire. I was intrigued that Rudy has closed some of the distance between Romney and himself. Romney now has only a 3 point lead. In the RCP average, it is down to 4.7 points.

I have argued in the past that Romney's strategy to get himself into the top tier has included spending lots of money early in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Romney's campaign assessed that it had the money to spend early, that spending early would drive his numbers up, and that these numbers would influence the pundit class (and political elites generally) to consider Romney a top tier candidate, effectively making him one.

And so, for a long while, Romney has been the only Republican candidate with a significant presence in these states. This is obviously what has driven his numbers up, but this also means his leads might be ephemeral. They might simply reflect the fact that voters are not spending a great deal of time thinking about these candidates, that when they are queried by a pollster they pick the name that comes to mind first, and that because Romney has been advertising his name comes first.

This is why I would disagree with the argument that Patrick Ruffini made early in the week about Romney:

Mitt Romney's strength in the early states remains a highly salient point. Right now, Romney is the only candidate with a clear, plausible path to the nomination. It's one that basically boils down to Win Iowa, Win New Hampshire, Win Michigan, Win Nevada, and hope that by that point you're running #1 in the national polls and are competitive with Hillary thanks to an injection of positive name ID.

While I certainly think that this is Romney's strategy, I disagree that he is the only one who could pursue this strategy. This argument depends upon the problematic assumption that summer polls sample meaningful voter opinions. If this assumption does not hold, we should see the numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire begin to change as the other candidates begin to dedicate resources to those states. As late as this week, the Giuliani campaign indicated that they were just beginning to focus on swaying voters in New Hampshire. So, we might start seeing even more movement.