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Opinion: Call it the ‘Beer Barrel Poll-ka’

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DES MOINES -- There are polls, and then there are polls, and the Court Avenue Restaurant & Brewing Company here has commissioned its own survey of the whims of its patrons. Zogby and Rasmussen need not fear -- the only thing scientific about this is the beer-making process.

From 4 p.m. to midnight on Mondays, the brewpub hands out a wooden token to each customer who comes in, and the tokens are cast as votes. As of last Monday, the brewpub poll was just as tight as the conventional polls -- though Bill Richardson would much rather have these results than the real surveys, where he is mired in the single digits.

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For the Democrats, Barack Obama, with 33.5%, was slightly ahead of Richardson at 33.3%, followed by Hillary Clinton at 17.1% and John Edwards at 16.2%.

On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani leads with 43.8% over Fred Thompson at 37.6% and Mitt Romney at 18.6%. Romney’s numbers could be weighted by religion -- Mormons don’t drink. But there was no explanation of why John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul‘s names weren’t available for beer-voting.

And near as we can tell, the bar is not a caucus site.

-- Scott Martelle

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