My RedState colleague streiff, on the fundamentals:
If polls are to be meaningful the MUST do two things. First, they must predict the order in which candidates finish. This isn’t terribly hard. A half dozen RedState commenters could accurately pick the order of finish in just about any race this cycle. The polls can’t reliably do that. And I’m not talking about squeakers where one candidate edges another by a point or less. I’m talking about missing the wholesale collapse of a candidate. Second, they must be able to get the vote, if not within MOE, by at least order of magnitude. When the second place finisher is understated by 13 points the polling is simply broken. It doesn’t need a tweak it needs massive rethinking.
The underlying problem in this cycle thus far is that it’s fairly easy to get Donald Trump’s range: anywhere from 35-41%. Where it always breaks down is what happens after that, and ‘what happens after that’ is fairly significant when we’re fighting for every delegate. If the polls had been more accurate then Marco Rubio might have dropped out last week, which would have probably given Ted Cruz Missouri and North Carolina and given him a good shot at Illinois*. The good news there is that the calendar is going to be a little less crowded from here on in, so we may see better work.
Or not.
Moe Lane
*Mind you, I’m not going to play should-haves: we don’t have time travel, so the exercise is pointless.
It’s easy to poll garbage when the process is garbage. Open primaries -and hell, candidacy access more porous than the Southern border allowing Trump to even *consider* running on the GOP ticket- make the whole party system meaningless.
I suspect that, after the wreck this November, various state GOP parties will finally close their primaries once and for all.
I … am not from Missouri…. but I can spell it.
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I don’t want to put a lot of trust in the State parties …but will be very pleased and more than a little surprised if they do close primaries.
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I don’t think enough of ’em are interested in being called racist (“because racist” is apparently the first card in the deck for voter access of *any* kind) over this…
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Mew
I doubt Texas will close their primaries, since you don’t even register a party at all currently. At least I don’t recall ever having to have done so, and no mechanism to change.
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When you voted in the primary they used to stamp your voter registration card with the primary you voted in, but now it’s all done by computer.
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And since, barring a special session being called, the Texas legislature won’t even meet at all this year, I doubt it will really be on folks mind in 2017.
I am failing to see Trump’s end game here, he has yet to break 50% in any state. He isn’t a lifelong Republican who can say vote for me or the Dem candidate will win, he is a Dem. Some people say he has a lot of charm when he wants to use it but after seeing his ugly side I don’t see that any amount of charm will change people’s minds. So if he can gets the nomination how does he expect to win the election? Especially when he bought into the Hillary’s inevitable shtick so he ran as a Republican. And the longer the primary goes on the stronger the opposition to him grows. Hillary’s a lousy candidate but she’s not that lousy that 35 to 41% of the republican vote is going to beat her.
At a guess, he’s worked out that the strategy he’d need to get nominated would work better in a Republican primary than in a Democratic one, but has not yet realized that the Republican electorate has a significant number of people in it who will happily flip Trump the bird and go home. Although, to be fair: all political parties look monolithic from the outside.
All monoliths are full of stars.
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That said, may I suggest devoting some column-space to Cruz’ alleged warts? Deconstructing dominionisn would be a useful one…since Ted’ll need the other side of the party to show up too…
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Mew