Posted on 02/02/2016 10:23:32 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Iowa pollsters' losses were Ted Cruz's gain Monday night, as even the most storied surveys of the Hawkeye State's electorate missed the Texas senator's surging momentum.
Cruz cruised to victory in the early-voting state's caucuses, easily beating bombastic billionaire Donald Trump 27.6% to 24.3%, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio finishing a close third, with 23.1%.
But polls, even ones released just hours before voters headed to caucus-locations, showed Trump in the solid lead: A Quinnipiac University poll out Monday afternoon had Trump beating Cruz 31% to 24%, while a Des Moines Register / Bloomberg Politics survey out the day before had the outspoken mogul up 28% to 23%.
How did they get it so wrong?
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
You know, theres this thing called an ELECTION.
You just go into a booth, cast a vote, and then go on with your business.
The caucus system is stupid and probably legally suspect.
I think they underestimated Cruz’s ability to turn out new voters. They used the old model turnout on him exclusively.
But, my gut also tells me we were locked into the old landline dominant polls that have proven wrong in England, Israel, and Kentucky. Only oldsters have exclusively landlines, too many don’t even have landlines, too many won’t answer their cellphones, so new methods are data collecting huge samples online, and THEN using random selections from that data to supplement the landline/cellphone data. It appears to work better.
Quite.
And the lazy media, who rely on polls rather than reporting, cannot handle the reality that many people hate polls and pollsters - especially a pre-election flood of calls - and gladly subvert this so-called oracle.
The pollsters calculated that new voters would turn out for Trump. Their methodology was wrong, which is not new.
So is Iowa politics actually driven by the bully pulpit?
Two words: Ground Game.
Some polls are. They are used to determine where to spend cash and they can be very accurate; they are also closely held secrets. Same as marketing research -if you have $50K to spend, who is for you, who is against you and who hasn’t decided, and what media does that undecided group consume, that is where you spend your precious cash. And like marketing research you and I will never see that data (except when I worked on those polls). With that exception you are pretty much right.
Great point. Many people are afraid to admit they are for Trump because the Cruzers will attack you.
The GOPe’s Stop Trump strategy was successful. They convinced enough voters to dump all the other candidates and split their votes between Rubio and Cruz.
The Caucus is the perfect setting for doing this.
Will not be nearly so easy in primaries.
Yeah, like a net 10 point difference.
One difference is that Cruz was flipping voters inside caucus saying Carson dropped out.
As far as the Cruz win, he and Rush launched operation chaos against Trump last few day. If you don’t stop Trump here, he’ll be unstoppable. Thus some who favored another candidate voted Cruz to give their guy or gal a chance.
That’s true’ but so are caucuses.
If you live by the polls, you will die by the polls.
bttt
people lie.
It’s evangelical to LIE:-)
Both Cruz and Rubio overperformed and Trump underperformed. It will be interesting to see what effects those results have on the campaigns as they move on.
Well, how else could he beat a winner whom everyone else knew was going to cruise to a YUUUUUUUUGE win? (Because he’s a winner, after all, and winners win.)
No, we know no such thing.
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