What’s At Stake In The South Carolina Republican Primary

FiveThirtyEight ^ | February 19, 2016 | Nate Silver

[2ndDivisionVet]

We've been inundated with polls: South Carolina polls, Nevada polls, national polls, general election polls. In fact, there are so many polls that you can tell yourself pretty much any story you like about the Republican presidential primary. Is Ted Cruz surging? There's a poll for that. Is Cruz stalling out? There's a poll for that too. Have you heard about the poll showing a Ben Carson comeback? OK, I made that one up. But earlier this week, you could find a poll with John Kasich in second place in South Carolina, even though he was polling at about 2 percent there earlier this month.

If this were a general election, we'd just say "take the average" and be done with it. That's still pretty good advice. The average lets us say, with a high degree of confidence, that Donald Trump is ahead in South Carolina. (That part's easy: Trump has led in all but one poll there since July.) With a slightly lesser but still high degree of confidence we can say that Marco Rubio has gained ground: He was at 13.1 percent in our South Carolina polling average before Iowa1 and is at 16.8 percent now. We can also say that Trump has probably lost a couple of percentage points, but probably not more. We can say that Jeb Bush's numbers are flatter than the places listed here.

But unlike in the general election, where the polling average usually gives you a fairly precise estimate of where the race will end up, the South Carolina polls could still wind up being way off. We warned you about this before Iowa, where the polls mispredicted the order of finish, and likewise before New Hampshire, where they were closer to the mark....

[VanDeKoik]

Trump will be first and Rubio might pull out a strong 2nd, or a tie with Cruz.

Past that, there wont be any suprises.

[BigEdLB]

The two polls with the most overt immaculate surges disagree. NBC/WSJ has Trump falling to a Cruz surge. Opinion Savvy has a Rubio doing the same. This is evidence of something which smells like cooks in a kitchen cooking two competing pots of minestrone soup, and one eating to put extra oregano in, and the other demanding more garlic. In truth, the good pot of soup needs a balance of flavors. Three tracking polls, Emerson, ARG, and the SC.House Caucus all show fairly flat for Trump in low to mid 30s with the others vying for 2nd in the high teens, with a topping out at about 20. We will see in about 12 hours. If the tracking polls are off, and one of the pots of soup turns out to be tasty. If this is the case, it will prove that craps shoot is the name of the game in polling. Important because the GOP CAUCUS is in Nevada on Tuesday

[scooby321]

This is the end of Cruz

[catfish1957]

This is the end of Cruz

The voting is are already over? Is the fix in like the Drudge Debate poll?

The end? I seem to remember sTrumpets saying that on Caucus Day in Iowa too.

[MIA_eccl1212]

He won’t agree but that is probably true

[HotHunt]

All of these polls coming out all of the time with varying results, gives each candidate's supporters grist for telling anyone who will listen, that their guy is winning or pulling ahead or that their opponent is slipping and falling behind.

It reminds me of a statistics class I took as a graduate student in business. The text for the class was entitled, "How To Lie With Statistics."

We spent a good portion of that semester talking about how you can take the same set of numbers and come up with any result you wanted, depending on how you interpreted them. 1+ 1 didn't always = 2.