Below The Beltway

After slowly gaining on Mitt Romney through the summer and fall, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee now stands as the frontrunner in the Iowa Republican Caucuses:

Mike Huckabee has leaped ahead of Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney in Iowa, seizing first place in a new Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus participants.

Huckabee wins the support of 29 percent of Iowans who say they definitely or probably will attend the Republican Party’s caucuses on Jan. 3. That’s a gain of 17 percentage points since the last Iowa Poll was taken in early October, when Huckabee trailed both Romney and Fred Thompson.

(…)

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the frontrunner in national polls, holds third place in Iowa at 13 percent, despite waging a limited campaign in the state.

Thompson, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee who waited until September to formally enter the race for the Republican nomination, has slipped to fourth place in the Iowa Poll, at 9 percent.

U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas are tied for fifth place at 7 percent each. Four other candidates trail them. The new Iowa Poll, conducted over four days last week, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

As I’ve noted before, caucuses are harder to poll than primaries because it’s much harder to determine who will actually show up on caucus night and spend the time there that’s required. Nonetheless, the fact that Huckabee has come out of nowhere to become the frontrunner says a lot about the strength of his campaign — and even more about the weakenesses of Mitt Romney’s campaign.

The next 31 days of campaigning, interrupted as they will be by the Christmas holiday, New Year’s Day, and college football games, will be very interesting.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, things are just as interesting with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards all within 5 percentage points of each other in the last Des Moines Register Poll:

Barack Obama has pulled ahead in the race for Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses, while the party’s national frontrunner Hillary Clinton has slipped to second in the leadoff nominating state, according to The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll.

Despite the movement, the race for 2008’s opening nominating contest remains very competitive about a month before the Jan. 3 caucuses, just over half of likely caucusgoers who favor a candidate saying they could change their minds.

Obama, an Illinois senator, leads for the first time in the Register’s poll as the choice of 28 percent of likely caucusgoers, up from 22 percent in October. Clinton, a New York senator, was the preferred candidate of 25 percent, down from 29 percent in the previous poll.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who led in the Register’s May poll, held steady with 23 percent, in third place, but part of the three-way battle.

Based on the poll numbers, it would seem that the strategy that Obama and other Democratic candidates have taken of going on the offensive against Hillary seems to be working.

H/T: James Joyner