TJ Walker breaks down how to read political polls beyond the headlines. He uses Trump's Republican primary lead as an example, showing why you need to look at subgroups, favorability ratings, and party support. Early frontrunners like Giuliani and McCain have crashed before, so airtime alone doesn't guarantee a nomination.
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Donald Trump is now number one in the polls among likely Republican voters nationwide and in some early primary states. What does this mean? So, folks, this isn't a political channel, but I do believe if you want to be a good communicator, a great communicator, you have to come up with good messages. In order to come up with good messages, you have to occasionally look at polling data and understand it in an intelligent, rational way. Now, the polls, in fact, do show that Donald Trump is number one among likely Republican voters when it comes to their selection for president in 2006. What does this really mean? Well, poll. It's not. It's simply not true that polls are meaningless or polls are meaningless a year and a year and a half before the elections. That's not true. Polls are often extraordinarily meaningful. Go back in time to 1999. George W. Bush was number one in the polls among Republicans. John McCain, a year and a half out, was number one in a lot of polls. And you can go on and on and on. Mitt Romney did quite well in 2011 in early polls. So it's simply not true that polls don't matter. But you have to look at all the polling data. And folks, you don't have to go get a PhD in statistics. You just have to read everything the poll measured. So, for example, when it comes to Donald Trump, the polls also show that between 50 and 80, I've seen as high as 90% of Republican voters would never vote for Donald Trump for president. Well, that really tells you all you need to know. In fact, Donald Trump, if you can even call him a major presidential candidate, is the most unpopular presidential candidate to ever run or to ever try to get a party's nomination. It is simply not possible for a candidate who's disliked, loathed by the vast, vast majority of members of a party to win that party nomination. It isn't how politics works. So anyone. Again, you don't need any statistical background. Anyone who can read past the first headline of polls like this knows Donald Trump is not ever going to win the Republican nomination. Doesn't mean he can't hog a lot of airtime, get a lot of attention in debates and in political news coverage. But he's simply not a factor in the Republican nomination. Could he run as an independent and wreak havoc for the Republicans? Sure. Separate issue. Part of what you're doing when you're reading polls is you have to have a broader context to figure out what's meaningful. So when I look at a poll like Donald Trump. You have to ask yourself, has anyone like this ever gotten not only a Republican Party nomination, but any major party nomination? And the answer is simply no. When you're looking at polling data, you have to ask yourself, does someone like this have party institutional support, support from other political officials? With Trump? No. Now you can make the case, well, we want an insider, fine. But that's simply not relevant here to trying to understand the polling data. You have to ask yourself, does someone like this have party positions in alignment with most voters? All of these factors can help you weed out and weed in certain aspects of the data. So, for example, back in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was running for president. He was soaring above all the others when it comes to the Republicans seeking the GOP nomination. He was just destroying. He was up 30, 40, 50 points ahead of other candidates. Was it meaningful? Again, I would argue no, because when you look at the history of the Republican Party, there simply was no precedent of the party nominating someone who had views so out of sync with the mainstream of the Republican voters. Rudy Giuliani had numerous liberal positions on social issues that made him anathema to voters. They didn't have to think about that a year, year and a half out from voting. But it became relevant quickly once primaries started and his campaign completely imploded. So that's why you have to look beyond just the headline number. Polls can be very useful to communicators because you have to figure out what resonates with your audience. Doesn't matter if you're selling a candidate or soap. Sorry if that sounds crass for you, but you have to understand that's also why you're not going to see many Republican candidates attacking Donald Trump, because they realize that he's not what stands between them and getting the nomination. There's going to be. If they don't win themselves, it's going to be because of another candidate, not because of Donald Trump. So please look at polls, but you have to look at the fine print. Not even the fine print, the second sentence and the third sentence and the other findings to figure out what's truly meaningful.
