Remember Middle Cheese? Back in the happy days of the Kerry Spot, I chatted regulary with a longtime, smart Republican who was in a position to hear what the big cheeses in the Bush campaign were saying to the little cheeses. See here, here, here, and here for a pleasant trip down memory lane.
Middle Cheese is now affiliated… with the Romney campaign. (This narrows the list of suspects to… oh, about half the veteran Republican operatives in the country.)
El Queso Medio responded to my question of why Romney’s surge in the early primary states hasn’t yet reflected in the national polls.
“First of all, he’s not running a national campaign. Second, national polls tend to reflect name identification more than anything else. But most important of all: According to GOP strategist Mike Murphy, states whose primaries are held in January (IA, WY, NH, MI, NV, SC, and FL) only make up about 14 percent of a national poll’s sample.”
I guess if you’ve got little beyond the most basic name recognition among 86 percent of Americans, it’s going to put a pretty low ceiling on your support.