If I may borrow a phrase from the late philosopher Lemmy Kilmeister, kill these things with death.

After every presidential election, we hear weeping and wailing and much gnashing of teeth about the disservice that "horse-race" reporting does to the political process. Tell me, then, what possible actual news value there is in a poll taken over a year before a freak nominating mechanism that should be sent down the Mississippi on a raft anyway? (If you have enough death left, kill the Iowa caucuses with it, too.) Let CNN attempt to explain. First, its own poll:

Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to top the list when the potential Democratic electorate is asked who they'd be most likely to support for the nomination, with 30% saying they would back him. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders lands in second with 14%. Support for each is about the same as in October. O'Rourke lands in third with 9%, up 5 points since October. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker follows at 5%. California Sen. Kamala Harris and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have each dropped 5 points since October and are now below 5% support.

If I may say so, so fcking what? By next fall, we might be in the middle of a whopping big recession. We might be at war with Iran. We might be involved in both. In addition, does anybody really believe that Joe Biden, former senatorial attack mutt for the credit-card industry, won't be Target A of the entire Democratic base, if said base somehow got out of its own way?

The size of the field suggests the race could go deep in to the primary season, a prospect many Democrats would like to avoid. The poll finds 51% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say it would be better for the party if one strong candidate emerged early on as the clear front-runner for the nomination, while 41% said they'd prefer a number of strong candidates to compete for the nod. That's a reversal from 2015, when 53% said they wanted to see a number of strong candidates contend for the lead, but only Hillary Clinton and Sanders ended up finding substantial support.

Yes, things are different now so, therefore, things are not the same.

The Democratic presidential field in not-so-much-happier times. Getty Images

Let's move along to our quadrennial overemphasis on what some aging, Bible-banging hayshakers think is going on, again via CNN:

"The Iowa Poll" will be released Saturday night at 8 p.m. ET. This will be the first poll The Des Moines Register releases in partnership with CNN since the poll's founding in 1943. Saturday's poll will provide early insights into likely Democratic caucus goers and their views on the potential 2020 candidates.

No. It will not.

We will glean nothing from this poll that will be worth a damn by Christmas, let alone by a year from January. This poll exists so that the Des Moines Register and CNN can put both their brands into the same sentence, one that also contains the word, "first," which marketing people love. Any actual "insights" will exist only in retrospect; if whoever comes out on top actually gets the nomination, those two operations will deafen each other crowing about it. I suspect that the results will have the approximate shelf-life of a bag of leftover corn dogs from last summer's state fair. Politics are not cute, nor should they be.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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