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The Iowa Poll was well within its margin of error last week, and illustrated why top line numbers don’t always tell the full story. Examining voters’ enthusiasm for a candidate makes a difference in close races, and in the race for the number two spot in Iowa, the lack of enthusiasm for Nikki Haley is the most likely reason why she slightly underperformed the poll.

Despite coming in second, DeSantis is now out of the race, leaving us with a more-or-less two-way race in New Hampshire, whose primary election takes place tomorrow.

According to a Washington Post-Monmouth University poll released yesterday, Trump is going to walk away with the New Hampshire GOP voter. Haley appears to have consolidated the votes of every candidate to drop out so far, except for most of Ramaswamy and Desantis’ supporters, who appear to have consolidated for Trump. But once again, her approval and enthusiasm numbers are pretty unimpressive. Nearly 1 in 5 say they’d still consider another candidate (a little more than 1 in 10 say the same for Trump).

If you’ve been paying attention to the primary (most people have not!), then this probably comes as no great surprise, despite media coverage that really, really wants it to be a horse race. Politico – the media outlet practically founded on a fervent belief in horse races and beauty contests – came extremely close to the line of admitting it’s all over but the fighting when it wrote:

The bigger and more obvious question is, will the primary continue past Tuesday night?

What to know about the Post-Monmouth Poll

Some notes about this poll:

• Sample size is 712 potential voters
• Potential voters include registered voters who are Republicans or undeclared, who give themselves at least a 50/50 chance of voting in the primary tomorrow.
• They used a mixed method approach for contacting people – some were completed live on cellphones and landlines, others were invited via cellphone text message to complete an online survey.
• Overall, the survey has a +/-4.2% margin of error
• They include their weighting methodology as well as margins of error based on different demographic and ideological factors in the top line report.
• They also include a link to the cross tabs! You can dig in here

“Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is the politics of managing mistrust.”
– Ivan Krastev, political scientist

Super fun fact about this poll: The Post-Monmouth poll is a member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative. Here’s how AAPOR describes the initiative:

AAPOR’s Transparency Initiative is designed to promote methodological disclosure through a proactive, educational approach that assists survey organizations in developing simple and efficient means for routinely disclosing the research methods associated with their publicly-released studies.

The Transparency Initiative is an approach to the goal of an open science of survey research by acknowledging those organizations that pledge to practice transparency in their reporting of survey-based research findings. In doing so, AAPOR makes no judgment about the approach, quality or rigor of the methods being disclosed.

There are two things to keep in mind as you see various polling organizations include this disclosure in their reports:

• It is not a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. AAPOR isn’t endorsing these polls. To be included in the initiative, you have to adhere to their transparency guidelines for disclosing survey methods. It’s possible (though I’d guess unlikely) that a disreputable pollster could be part of this initiative.
• It is intended to help polling organizations learn from each other about approaches to designing surveys and sample. This is an initiative for organizations that care about transparency and are willing to submit themselves to public scrutiny.

Coming up on the pod…

This week we’ll address a few interesting questions about why pollsters often seem unconcerned with whether the answer someone gives is something they truly believe.

Links:

Looking back at Iowa

• How different groups voted in the Iowa caucuses, according to entrance polls [WaPo]
• Poll: Majority of Iowa GOP caucus-goers don’t believe Biden legitimately won in 2020 [WaPo]
• What to make of the Iowa caucus entrance polls [NYT]

Worth a listen:

• Five tips for understanding political polls this election season [NPR, Planet Money’s The Indicator]
• Polling, Money, Trump Fatigue: Your 2024 Election Questions [The New Yorker]

That’s it for now – might send an end-of-week wrap-up of any exit polls from New Hampshire, and any interesting changes to polling methods and relevance after a primary that appears to be over before it starts.