The final chapter on the 2004 presidential election may not yet bewritten, but it is not too soon to look ahead to the 2008 contest.Public pollsters have been assessing opinions about the 2008campaign for months already. Given the importance of frontrunnerstatus in an increasingly frontloaded presidential primary system(Mayer 2004), the 2008 race hasalready begun for many prospective candidates, parties, and voters.In this article I analyze early public opinion polling dataavailable from the Roper Center's IPOLL database about the 2008 raceto determine the frontrunning candidates (at least through June2005) and to reflect on the preliminary dynamics of the nextpresidential race.