Here Come The Polls

(CBS)  Dotty Lynch is CBSNews.com's Political Points columnist. E-mail your questions and comments to Political Points.

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There is an old canard that polls at this point in a Presidential campaign are meaningless, that all they measure is name recognition. But in reality, polls about '08 Presidential choices which have come out in the last few weeks are filled with meaning.

The people who are leading today may not be the eventual nominees of their parties, although frontrunners like George W. Bush have been successful in driving others out of the race by parlaying frontrunner status into endorsements and cash.

Similarly, it would be a mistake to conclude that the candidates who have only an asterisk next to their names are fated for oblivion. Just ask Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton about that.

But for candidates planning their campaigns, and reporters who want to understand the political environment, the early polls do offer a fascinating view of where the electorate is at the beginning of a campaign season.

Journalists use polls to describe and analyze the voters; campaigns commission them to formulate strategy. To paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, campaigns don't use polls to ask why - they use polls to figure out why not.

Here are some tidbits from the recent polls that test the conventional wisdom (CW) about the candidates and provide their strategists with enough work to keep them off the street during the holiday season:

1. CW says: John McCain, the maverick, will appeal to Republican voters seeking change.

The recent (November 9-12) Cook Report/ RT Strategies poll shows that McCain still does better with Independents than with traditional Republicans but his support skews old. Among 18-34 year old Republican primary voters, he trails former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani by 34% to 15%.

Even when voters were asked to pick a first and second choice, only 31% of these younger GOP primary voters picked McCain while 52% chose Giuliani. McCain's age could be a factor — he is 70 and in 2008 would be the oldest first term President ever elected — although this may not be the complete explanation.

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