If you want to know the value of current polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, perhaps a perusal of the early summer poll results from 2007 would help. Jay Cost makes that case in a new Weekly Standard column.

At this point in 2007 the Iowa caucus polls showed Barack Obama trailing Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. When it was all said and done in January 2008, Obama would pull out an eight-point victory. On the GOP side, early Iowa polls had Mitt Romney in first place, Rudy Giuliani in second, and Mike Huckabee pulling an average of less than 5 percent of the vote!

National polling from June 2007 looks just as ridiculous. At that point, Clinton had a 10- to 20-point lead over Obama, which would expand to 30-points (and more) by the fall. By June 2008, when all the primaries and caucuses were finished, the two had basically split the Democratic vote. On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani had a 10-point or greater lead over John McCain in the national polls, while Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were both polling less than 10 percent each. When it was all said and done, McCain won 47 percent of the vote, Romney and Huckabee both won a touch more than 20 percent, and Giuliani…won just 3 percent! …

… There are good reasons why we are so consistently surprised by the nomination outcome. The biggest one is that primary battles neutralize the most valuable piece of information that voters have: the party label. When you tell people that you are a Republican, they can get a good sense of what your opinions are on a whole host of issues. Ditto if you are a Democrat. If you are running for office, your party label will determine how up to 90 percent of the electorate will vote. But in primaries, that information is simply not useful – all your opponents are either Republicans or Democrats – which means that voters have to gather information in other, more time-consuming, less reliable ways. This makes it really difficult to predict how a primary will happen six months out. Voters know precious little about the candidates at this point, and more importantly most of them are not even trying to learn just yet. It’s the summer for goodness sake, and the 90 percent of Americans who are not political junkies just don’t care yet. There will be plenty of time for them to figure out whom to support when the leaves start falling from the trees…in four months! Thus, the choices that polling respondents offer here in June are far too contingent on future learning to have any real value.