Iowa Poll: More Reasons To Pick Edwards

There's some interesting new 2008 presidential polling today. All the data comes from a sample of Iowa voters, so take it with a grain of whatever seasoning you like on corn.

The pollsters took 4 Democratic candidates (Hillary, Edwards, Vilsack, and Kerry) and 4 Republican candidates (Giuliani, McCain, Frist, and Romney), and asked voters who they would choose in each of the 16 possible head-to-head matchups. Unsurprisingly, Giuliani came out as the most electable Republican candidate, beating Edwards by 8 and beating all the other Democrats by 13 or more. McCain was next -- he leads Edwards by a mere 1% margin, and no other Democrat is anywhere close. Kerry falls to McCain by 14, Vilsack by 15, and Hillary by 17. Overall, Edwards is easily the best Democratic candidate against all Republicans, beating Romney and Frist by double-digit margins. The other Democrats have single-digit leads at best. Hillary loses to everybody.

They also asked people which candidates they had favorable impressions of. This is one of the rare polls where any Democrat has a higher net favorability rating than Edwards, but here it's just a matter of home-field advantage -- Iowa Governor Vilsack's favorable-unfavorables run at 63-35, while Edwards runs at 54-30. Edwards does top all Democrats in the "Very Favorable" category, with 22% of all voters professing intense Johnny love. Favorability numbers were collected for lesser-known candidates too -- Feingold stands at 19-14, Bayh at 17-11, and Warner at 15-7.

On the Republican side, Giuliani is destroying everybody at 71-18. McCain sits pretty at 59-24. But not that pretty -- his 59% are divided between 14% with "Very Favorable" impressions and a whopping 45% with "Mostly Favorable" impressions.

If you want to see the raw results yourself, they're tucked away at the bottom left of the page under a lot of other stuff.