I live in MN, and yesterday I was rushing out of the house to make a meeting, when my cell phone rang. Since it's my primary (only) line, I just answered it on the way to the car. It turns out it was a Dean volunteer
in IA phonebanking. Why would an IA volunteer be calling MN two days before the IA caucus?
Well, probably for the some of the same reasons Dean was in GA this morning. For all the polling that's been done in IA, I don't think any of them really have much of an idea of what's going on. The only people that know what might unfold tomorrow are the campaigns that are counting their 1s and 2s.
Pretend for a minute that you know how many 1s and 2s you have, and you also know how many 1s and 2s your 3 closest opponents have. You then know roughly what the total attendance is likely to be, as well as your percentage of the total take. Let's now pretend that your percentage looks pretty damn good to you.
Now, you have several thousand people show up from out of state to work on the campaign. You know the folks in IA are pretty much sick of being bothered by now, and you only have so many 3s. So, what do you do? Put those people to work on races farther down the road and calling people with a history of giving decent amounts of money.
The only alternative to the "we know we're going to win" scenario that I can see is a "we know we're going to lose". Given Dean/Trippi, does anybody really think that if they thought they were going to lose they'd take time off to go to church in Georgia, Carter notwithstanding? I don't. I'm left with "Dean/Trippi know they're going to win" as the only viable explanation.