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Did Michele Bachmann win the Iowa Ames Straw Poll? Technically. But the truth is that she wasn’t the winner: Randy Travis was.

Let’s just get this out there at the outset: this article could probably also be appropriately subtitled “Why the Ames Straw Poll was even less important than you already thought it was.” The pundits have been busy claiming that the straw poll is an early measure of “organizational strength.” Maybe that was true in years past, but it certainly wasn’t this year. The candidates have wised up and learned how to game the results. Just like Joshua in War Games, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry even realized that “the only winning move is not to play the game.”

Once Mitt Romney and Rick Perry decided to bypass Ames, it was always going to be a race to see who could come in third to these two men. We’ve been saying for almost a month now that it’s a two-man race, but the current polls show that Bachmann is – at best – a distant third. So even if it was a straight-up competition, the winner was never going to have earned themselves more than a bronze medal in the GOP race anyway.

But it wasn’t a straight-up competition. The Ames Straw Poll is unique in that candidates bus their supporters in, pay for their tickets, provide a day of entertainment, and then do their best to cajole those supporters to vote for them on Saturday between 10am and 4pm. Is it a measure of organizational strength? Sure it is. But only if you completely confuse promotion with organization.

Put yourself in the shoes of Joe Iowan. A Republican candidate comes to town and asks you to take one of your valuable weekend days in the middle of summer and get on a bus to Ames, Iowa, to cast a vote for them in an election that doesn’t even award delegates to the party convention, let alone electors to the Electoral College. Will there be some people who are so excited by a given candidate that they’ll gladly do so? Of course there will. But the truth is that in a down economy with a dour public mood, most people are going to need a whole lot better reason than that.

What about just the chance to take part in this quadrennial spectacle, the carnival atmosphere and the media feeding frenzy? Wouldn’t that be interesting enough for someone to hop on a bus? Sure. “If you build it, [they] will come.” There will always be the curiosity-seekers who are willing to take a flyer just to have something interesting to do.

So if you’re a candidate, how do you reach beyond the political junkies and the terminally bored? You give them a show. CNN has a gallery of the candidate booths. The good folks over at Grubby Hub put together a quickie entertainment guide for the candidates at Ames as well.

If you knew absolutely nothing else about the candidates except the entertainment they offered, you could probably get a pretty good idea of where they wound up in the straw poll. Michele Bachmann brought in multi-platinum country and western superstar Randy Travis, Lonestar lead singer Richie McDonald, Christian music singer and preacher Charles Billingsley, and Little Texas lead singer Tim Rushlow. So if you’re an evangelical rural voter in Iowa, do you think you might get on an air-conditioned bus to go see a free concert with these guys? Sure you would. Do you really have better plans than that out in the middle of Nowheresville, Iowa this weekend? I sincerely doubt it.

Quite frankly, the question isn’t why Michele Bachmann won the Straw Poll. It’s why she didn’t win by a much larger margin. Her campaign handed out over 6,000 tickets. She only got 4,823 votes. That means that somewhere around 20% of the people to whom she gave tickets and put on a bus to vote for her actually wound up taking her tickets, going to the free concerts, and then proceeding to vote for someone else anyway.

It brings to mind those free timeshare weekends where they offer you a “free getaway” at one of their resort properties if you promise to let them hard-sell you one of their packages. Bachmann probably had a better conversion rate than the average timeshare weekend, but unless she can get Randy Travis to show up at every precinct on Election Day there’s no realistic way to duplicate this “victory” going forward.

Keep this little factoid in mind when you attempt to gauge Bachmann’s supposed success at the Ames Straw Poll: she got fewer votes in winning this year’s straw poll than Steve Forbes received while losing to Bush in 1999 (4,921) at both Ames Straw Poll and the Iowa caucus before dropping out completely early in February, 2000. No matter how you try to spin it, those aren’t particularly good numbers, and they surely aren’t the sign of an insurgent – or even resurgent – campaign.

Hat tip to Zero Hedge.