In downstate Oregon the other day, I had been talking to Mr and Mrs Comfort-Inn about their disappointment over Mitt Romney’s exit from the race. They didn’t think much of the Republican frontrunner John McCain. Would they be voting for Mike Huckabee then, the more conservative alternative to McCain?

“Well, he did do well in the Bible Belt,” Mr Comfort-Inn acknowledged, “but he seems kinda stupid to me. He’s said some really dumb things.”

Outside in the car park I relayed this comment to Tom and Rachael. Tom raised his eyebrow a little. “Huckabee’s too stupid to vote for? That’s a new one.”

And it was new; we’d heard a lot of things said about Mike Huckabee, but not that. It was the latter part of Tom’s comment that really struck a chord with me – in the six incredible weeks we’ve been on this trip, there have been only three constants:

(1) The breakfasts are as big as the Bay Bridge,
(2) The motels are as clean as Howard Hughes’ soapdish, and
(3) We never fail to unearth new opinions everywhere we go.

There was Anna, the Russian Studies graduate from Eugene, Oregon we met at a rock show the other night. She’s from a long line of Democrats (”my grandmother will kill me if she finds out I’m not voting Clinton”), and is a Democrat herself. And yet, she told us, she intends to vote for John McCain “for professional reasons” – which is ‘a new one’ again. Her theory is that a more hawkish foreign policy towards Putin’s Russia will increase her job opportunities in the field.

Then in San Diego, at the Mike Huckabee sign-waving event, there was the arch-conservative family man Mark, with his six-strong brood of healthy white Christian kids in tow; fiercely anti-abortion, and living in a city that bordered Mexico. He’d once had his car vandalised by illegal Mexican immigrants, he told us. If voter profiling was to tell you anything about this man’s stance on immigration, it doesn’t take much to work out what that would be. And yet, and yet…

“I think if you people come over to this country illegally, I would just say ‘welcome to the US, God bless you, pay your taxes, and become a citizen.’” He told us. “If you’re an immigrant and you commit a crime, you should be punished for it of course – but as a citizen.” Mark looked slightly nervous about his dissent. “I know I differ from my party on this issue.”

There were the Republicans at Berkeley University, hidden shyly away in the corner from the all-pervasive Democratic circus. The three people looking after the stall were split all over the place. One of the guys, Derek, had initially favoured Fred Thompson, who dropped out, then Rudy Giuliani, who dropped out, and at the time we spoke to him was going for Mitt Romney – who has of course now dropped out.

Victoria, the nerdy girl in a physics-meets-Star Wars t-shirt standing next to him, was marked out from her Berkeley peers just by being a Republican, and here she was bravely signing people up to the GOP in the middle of a liberal wonderland. Yet, surprisingly, she confessed to us that she didn’t really like any of her party’s prospective candidates: “It’s pretty disappointing, because it’s the first time I can vote. I want someone who’s socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and none of them fit that description.”

We have been told by supporters of at least six different candidates that theirs is the only candidate who tells it like it is. Well, they can’t all be the only one.

America’s two-party system does not bind people, indeed it seems much less tribal than the Labour/Conservative divide in the UK. We’ve heard people give their Presidential preferences as (1) Mitt Romney, (2) Barack Obama on more than one occasion now. And as we discovered from Iowa to North Carolina, from Texas to California, a lot of people would like an opportunity to vote for a viable third party candidate, whether they be a Green, a Libertarian, or something else altogether.

We’ve learned a lot on this trip beyond the fact that there are two ways of pronouncing the word ‘parmesan’, and one lesson stands out, for it has infused our every conversation with our fellow Americans – across 24 states in over six weeks on the road. It’s something that opinion polls will never be able to account for, that armchair ‘experts’ will never have the energy to investigate, and that serious news journalists will never be given the time or column inches to fully report – the remarkable, unpredictable intricacies of each voter’s opinions. Many journalists are doing terrific jobs reporting this election. But if you’re up against a deadline – which you always are – and you want a two-line quote to illustrate a point, you are likely to rule out the man or woman you met that morning who had a jumbled hodgepodge of atypical, confusing or contradictory beliefs.

This election, of all elections, can just not be reduced to clear, simple ideological blocks of opinion. Through unique combinations of experiences, influences and perceptions, two people with identical beliefs on paper can easily be gung-ho supporters of completely different candidates. Of course all media outlets, ourselves included, have to generalise opinions into blocks sometimes. But no-one should ever be allowed to forget that voters are like snowflakes – no two are alike. (Also, they’re hard to catch on your tongue.)

A voter’s opinions can be bizarre, they can differ from public perception, they can differ from their party, their candidate, and frequently they can be far beyond an accurate impression of the truth.

And that, my friends, is democracy.

“Only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about” (Amy Archer, The Hudsucker Proxy)

Here’s the latest polling for Iowa.

But polling schmolling. Marlene the clinical scientist from the Hillary Clinton rally last night seemed to be for Clinton – she clapped along in all the right places, wore the Clinton For President stickers, but admitted afterwards that she was still undecided.

“I’m going to check out Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Mitt Romney when they’re in town tomorrow (i.e. today). I’ve still got 48 hours to decide and I want to be absolutely sure.”

Another thing that will heavily compromise the polling in this part of Iowa is that we’re in a university town. Obama’s surge has been attributed to his ability to galvanise the youth vote. But the youth vote ain’t here – the campus is a frozen wasteland. Iowa City’s students are at home – mostly in Illinois – for the holidays, and any promises they may have made to come back to ’school’ (university) three weeks early in order to caucus for Obama is going to be severely tempered by the ludicrously cold temperatures. It’s only 4 degrees. Farenheit. Last night the bogeys were freezing in my nose.

Here, by the way, is the story of how we got from Chicago to Iowa, with our new best friends Jess and Mark – written up for the UK’s leading political weekly, the New Statesman. More on Hillary coming soon. Right now we have an appointment with Mr Obama.

The only certainty that existed during this autumn’s phoney war was Hillary Clinton had the Democrat race sewn up: everyone felt that her experience in the Senate (and the White House), and her connections, and money, would be just too much for Barack Obama and John Edwards. Even that certainty has fallen now. For both parties, the first two elections, in Iowa on 3 January, and New Hampshire on 8 January, could be decisive.

Here are the front-runners in Iowa, with latest polling numbers from here:

Clinton 31%
Obama 27%
Edwards 22%
(the field)

Huckabee 28%
Romney 27%
McCain 14%
(the field, including national Republican poll-leader Rudy Giuliani!)

For Republicans and Democrats, an ideal world would see them with a clear favourite candidate from the outset, for whom primary elections were a mere administrative formality. This candidate would be experienced, youthful, strong, warm, have clear-cut views on abortion and gun control that manage to alienate no-one, have the public support of both Oprah and Chuck Norris, as well as being a decorated Vietnam war hero. The primary process would then just be one long, glorious, party-unifying coronation of this unlikely super-candidate.

But even with this election’s ludicrously intense primary calendar – front-loaded to the point that it almost topples over on itself – the race might remain so tight that both parties will still be choosing their candidate after 5 February’s 24-state voting jamboree, Super Tuesday.

Keep the crown on ice, and don’t make any bets on a winner yet.

Excitingly, no-one has anything locked up yet, on either side. Mike Huckabee continues his surge on the Republican side, while the Democrat race in Iowa is getting really pretty intimately close: though you can forgive Obama and Clinton huddling together for warmth on 27.3% of the vote when it’s as cold as it is.

By far the best way to get a first impression of the candidates on each side is to watch the CNN/YouTube debates: they are helpfully segmented into ADD-friendly five-minute questions asked by members of the public, so that you can pick and choose what matters to you (gun control? Iraq? Abortion? Iraq? Health-care? Iraq? Yankees or Red Sox? Um, Iraq?).

Republican debate
Democratic debate

As for who’s leading the pack at the moment, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani may be out in front in the national polling, but that’ll all look rather different if they lose out to Obama and Huckabee respectively in the Iowa caucus. It may sound like a scene from a cheap east-end gangster film, but right now everyone’s after big mo’.