From Steve Koczela
Steve Koczela suggests Donald Trump's poll numbers might be infliated:
DONALD TRUMP’S poll numbers are slipping in Iowa, and a new national poll is the first in a while to show him trailing. But a closer look at the polling suggests that the Trump wave may have been overstated from the beginning. His sizeable lead has been based largely on the influence of Internet polls. Trump’s summer surge looks far less impressive in telephone polls, and polls of likely voters show his lead was always smaller and is now gone entirely.
Looking across all pollsters and modes of pollsters, Donald Trump leads the field by 10 points, according to the Huffington Post, which averages poll results. Using only online polls, his lead is even bigger. But narrow the field to just telephone polls, and Trump’s lead over Ben Carson drops to 3 points. Drill down further to phone surveys that talked only to likely voters in the Republican primary, and Carson actually overtakes Trump.
Why? Among other reasons, online polls use RV or all adults, and have people who in the end might not vote.
Does that affect Bernie and Hillary? Maybe not quite as much, and least for Bernie.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Nicholas Confessore:
Bush: Speaking of, what a rough night for the former Florida governor. Feeling the heat from donors and supporting itching to move to Rubio, he dished out attacks on Rubio's attendance that his campaign had already advertised earlier in the night--and Rubio killed him. Bush seemed unsteady thereafter.
Rubio: Really good at parrying and turning away questions he didn't like, and he came out way better in a rough exchange with Bush. You will hear a lot of talk tomorrow from the punditry about how polished and confident he was.
Trump: Relatively restrained, for Trump. Muddled through, again, on policy and his own positions on guns and bankruptcy. Does it matter? And does he need those big attention-grabbing moments to stay on top? We'll find out.
Carson: Another low-key and sometimes muddled debate for candidate whose success seems to be independent of his debate performances.
Jonathan Bernstein:
Part of the problem might be that Bush is campaigning, in a way, as a factional candidate -- one who appeals mainly to a particular group within the party, rather than as a coalition-builder who can unite many groups. We expect such factionalism to appear at the ideological extremes or around unusual positions on specific issues. But sometimes a moderate candidate can try to win the nomination by rallying a narrow group.
If Jeb Bush is running such a campaign, his faction is Bush family loyalists. The candidate with "Bush" in his first and last names has often gotten mired in topics related to his family's political legacy, such as the Iraq war. His list of endorsements is heavy with those who served in his brother's or father's administration, or were close allies of one of them. He has refused to reach out to those in the party who might not be inclined to automatically support him or his family.
As numerous as they are, there aren't enough Bush family members to win, even if you count the spouses.
Jim Newell:
The good news—if it ever gets through your thick skulls that Ben Carson needs to be taken seriously as a competitor—is that driving up his negatives shouldn’t be all that hard. The guy’s a kook. So are a lot of you, but hoo-boy, Carson’s something else.
The tricky element here is that much of the reason Carson is soaring, especially in Iowa, is that Republican voters there like much of that kookiness. It’s not going to play well in a Republican debate if you go after him for saying that a Muslim shouldn’t be president, that Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery, that he would never raise the debt ceiling, or that gun control caused the Holocaust. Those are what we call “winners” to a certain subset of the American population: specifically, the one that decides which of you gets the Republican presidential nomination. It also may not be worth the risk to point out that Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist. At the end of the day, aren’t we all members of some nutty sect or another? Leave that for the fingerprint-free super PAC ads is what we’re getting at.
But there’s still plenty in Carson’s long list of questionable stances that will hurt him among hardcore Republican voters. Mention as often as possible that, until about three seconds ago, Carson wanted to eliminate Medicare and replace it with a form of health savings accounts. “Eliminate Medicare” is the consistent conservative theoretical position on Medicare. But it’s not one that many Republican voters care for, because Medicare is fantastic. Also point out that Carson loves legalized abortion. Say it just like that. It’s close enough to being almost, maybe, slightly true, at one point long ago, perhaps. In other words, it’s grounded enough by presidential debate standards. It is also worth pointing to the strong evidence that Carson is a grifter, and his presidential campaign one long—and thus far highly successful—grift.
John Sides:
Debates can move the polls, but rarely determine the winner.
I said this right before the first GOP debate, and it’s still true. When political observers judge a candidate to have performed well, that usually translates into a bump in news coverage and in poll numbers. But that by itself isn’t enough. Ask Carly Fiorina. Here is a graph of her news coverage and poll numbers:
Both debates — including the first debate, where she appeared with the second-tier candidates — helped her. But the effect was temporary. Although debates can produce a good news cycle or two, that’s not how nominations are won. Which brings us to…
Matthew Dickinson with a similar look at Trump:
As I conceded to Melber, when The Donald announced his candidacy last July, I did not anticipate that he would remain atop the polls for this long. (Nor, I suspect, did many of my colleagues). But this doesn’t mean we are clueless when it comes to understanding why he has remained the front-runner for so long. As I wrote in July soon after Trump began his meteoric rise in the polls, his candidacy was being fueled by a media that found his controversial, over-the-top rhetoric impossible to ignore. I concluded that post by writing, “The sooner the media begins evaluating The Donald on the details of his policies and his governing expertise, rather than on his deliberately provocative comments designed to mobilize a disaffected public, the sooner The Donald’s political bubble is likely to burst. Alas, I have little confidence that most journalists, in this era of dwindling audiences and shrinking profit margins, will be able to resist taking the easy road by dismissing The Donald as a serious candidate. To date, it is a media strategy that has The Donald laughing all the way to the top of polls.”
In retrospect, where I miscalculated was in not fully believing my own prediction; clearly I underestimated the media’s willingness to resist The Donald’s ability to dictate his press coverage. It turns out that pundits have found it impossible to resist reporting on Trump’s rhetorical excesses, even as they chide themselves for doing so. As John Sides demonstrates, The Donald’s standing in the polls closely tracks the amount of media coverage he has received; as coverage goes up, so does his standing in the polls.
Greg Sargent:
There seems to be a whole lot of hand-wringing and maneuvering today around the notion that the Democratic Primary battle between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is about to get a whole lot tougher.
To which your humble blogger says: So what? That’s what primaries are for.
Philip Bump:
What's outlined in the interview is a strategy that can be summarized as follows: Don't be afraid to get dirty, emphasize Clinton's policy flips, leverage Sanders's small-donor advantage. There are some other points, which we'll get to, but that's the big picture. Team Sanders would like Heilemann (and Bloomberg readers) to come away thinking they've got a good shot at the ring. (The most-picked-up line from the interview is an awfully presumptuous — however joking — assertion that Clinton would "make a great vice president.")
But if the plan is close to what's articulated, it must be very, very early in the process — because it hasn't done much.
Let's take the words of Sanders's brain trust and overlay them on top of a more robust strategy for beating Clinton, and see how Sanders fares. Items marked with a checkbox have been completed.