The conventional wisdom in the blogosphere is that if a Republican candidate takes a strong stance against illegal immigration he or she will be on their way to a dominating Presidential victory in 2008. I'm going to challenge that wisdom. While a vast majority of Americans may want a crackdown on illegal immigrants it may not be the most important issue to them.

You're never going to agree with any political candidate on every issue. There are always issues you have to compromise on when you hit the voting booth. Candidate A may be for lower taxes and small government, but wants to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage. Candidate B thinks amending the constitution for such a petty reason is ridiculous, but she's also for expanding government social services and is really upset with all those "tax cuts for the rich".I'm going to vote for Candidate A. I hate his stance on gay marriage, but we agree on issues that are higher up on my policy totem pole.

80+% of the public may be all for building a bigass wall on our southern border. But is that more important to them than the War on Terror. Or taxes? Or government spending? Or social security? Or abortion? I don't know. Immigration may be the most important issue to some people, for other people it's further down on their checklist. It might be something they'll compromise on to support a candidate that they mostly agree with.

It's like American Idol. I loved Elliott, but I didn't really, really love him. I wasn't willing to sacrifice two hours of my time to vote for him. If I took an opinion poll, I'd come out as supporting him 100%, but when the real moment of truth came, he couldn't count on my vote.

That same scenario might play out with whatever Democrat or Republican finally comes out as the candidate of immigration reform. A lot can happen in two years. By then, many Americans may find that when they're in the privacy of the voting booth, immigration isn't such an important issue after all. Opinion polls don't accurately measure the public's passion on any issue. Elections, on the other hand...