Three years out from an election is a perfectly reasonable time to start polling, right?

After all, if sports writers can argue about which NBA stars should be representing team USA in the 2012 summer Olympics (Brian Scalabrine?) and commentators can claim the 2010 World Cup as a valid topic of conversation while broadcasting from the 2006 World Cup and climatologists can bicker about the lifespans of glaciers and the endangered species that live on them, then surely political pundits and pollsters can have their fun speculating about which Republican is going to take on Barack Obama in the next presidential bout.

Just as I wrote a few weeks ago about the love of the sports fan waiting until the off-season to truly blossom, so too does the life of the political junkie find its greatest joy in the speculative irrelevance of the electoral off-year. When polls have no consequences and editorials have no weight and theorizing is so much crystal-ball gazing, the punditocracy, both professional and kitchen-table-based, can really feel free to let their minds and their mouths run wild, free from the philosophical tethers of, you know, reality.

Take, for example, a poll released this past Friday by Rasmussen: It’s not about health care or the war in Afghanistan or the economy or job performance on Capitol Hill. No. This poll looks at who the favorite is, as of October 2009, to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (which comes with a tiara, the keys to a brand-new Toyota Tacoma, and the thrill of taking on the Barack Obama political machine in the next general election).

According to the poll, as of Friday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the preferred candidate of 29% of Republicans nationwide, followed by Mitt Romney (24%), Sarah Palin (18%), Newt Gingrich (14%), and Tim Pawlenty (4%).

It goes on: “Romney leads all prospects among voters who attend church once a month or less. Huckabee leads among more frequent churchgoers. Huckabee holds a huge lead among Evangelical Christians with Palin in second and Romney a distant third. Huckabee and Romney are essentially even among other Protestants while Romney has the edge among Catholics.

“Romney leads among Republicans earning more than $75,000 a year while Huckabee leads among those who earn less.”

Now, as much as I love this kind of ultra-specific poll-modeling – “While Palin has a slight edge over Huckabee in the all-important Jewish Moderate-Conservatives Who Don’t Eat Cake on Wednesdays demographic, Gingrich is doing surprisingly well with Anorexics Below the Poverty Line Who Think Organized Religion Is the Cause of All the World’s Problems But Who Feel a Deep Spiritual Connection to the Universe and All Living Things in It” – it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the results, printed more than two years out from the first primary, are the very definition of an institutional absurdity.

But in America 2009, absurdity in the defense of relevance is no vice. In our rapidly evolving media environment, ridiculousness is expected and accepted. But what cannot be accepted — what can not be tolerated, what can not be justified — is the sense that a company that bases its reputation on up-to-the-minute analysis is out of touch with the proper tools needed to cull information for that analysis. These days, the only sin in America is not being tuned in. And something about the old-school Rasmussen polling model – “You sir, who will you be voting for?” – smacks of rotting antiquity.

Take Chris Cillizza’s piece in The Washington Post today about the status of the Sarah Palin political identity on Facebook. It may seem like so much new-media fluff to stodgy old guys still married to old-school notions of political relevance, but it also might just prove to be more telling of the status of the Republican political landscape than any 10 Rasmussen polls could ever hope to be. There, Cillizza writes, “As of press time, Palin’s Facebook site had nearly 930,000 supporters … By way of comparison, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) has 82,000 Facebook supporters while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) has 121,000.”

That paragraph right there should be enough to have Huckabee and Romney shaking with fear. If Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign proved anything (as if this point really needed to be proven), it’s that you can’t view new media, especially social-networking, as some sort of cute adjunct to an otherwise traditionally managed campaign. A candidate’s approach to the Internet says everything about that candidate’s understanding of the times we’re living in and the voters who are living in them.

For all her faults, Palin is smart enough to know that having a million friends/fans on Facebook is like having a marketing/information-dissemination army on your side, ready with the click of a mouse to do your bidding. Facebook may have proven to us once and for all that the insignificant particulars of human lives are sources of fascination — both as writers and readers, both as exhibitionists and voyeurs — but perhaps more fascinating (and more important for politicians looking to get out the vote) is that it has shown people to be happy pro bono public-relations advocates for whatever cause, event, band, person, puppy video they deem worthwhile. People love being in the know, Facebook has shown us, and they love letting other people know they’re in the know. And the best way to let other people you’re in the know, and that you knew before they did, is to be the one sending that person what it is they don’t know about but you do.

Cillizza talks about Palin using Facebook to do an “end-run” around the mainstream media and talk directly to her supporters, both actual and potential. Which is true. But it’s more than that: Facebook allows Palin (just like Obama, who knew a little something about being written off by mainstream-media folks and needing to find new unfiltered ways of gaining momentum) to do an end-run around the mainstream PR/marketing/political advertising bureaucracy, putting aside traditional notions of pay-for-play access and huge media blitzes. Instead, all she has to do is throw up the occasional post about her support of Glen Beck, her distaste for Washington insiders, or (most famously) her belief that Obamacare will sentence the elderly to death, and – bang! – she’s got a million people ready, willing, even desirous to spread that message around the world.

In other words, Facebook has not only exposed us as advertisers for ourselves; it’s turned us all into volunteer sandwich-board wearers for others.

So if I were Mike Huckabee, I’d take cold comfort in that 28 when comparing it to Palin’s 930,000. One is just a number on a piece of paper taken three years — and a million media cycles — out from the next presidential election. The other represents virtual bodies on the virtual ground, ready to go to war for their favorite former governor from Alaska.

Especially when going to war means never having to leave your house or even change out of your pajamas.