Pollsters struggle to assess 19 GOP contenders Large field scrambles the horse race, posing problem for GOP debate invitations.

There are 19 Republicans seriously considering launching campaigns for president, and 10 numbers on a phone. That causes a big problem for pollsters using automated polling technology, one of the most common forms of public polling.

Thus, when GOP officials gather in Arizona this week to tackle the vexing question of how to decide which candidates are allowed to participate in party-sanctioned debates, they won’t be able to easily fall back on the most logical way to winnow the field: polling.


That only compounds the stresses on the Republican National Committee, which is determined to avoid the circus-like atmosphere of some of the party’s 2012 debates. Only one thing is clear, officials say: There’s no way the debates, which begin in Cleveland in August, can accommodate all of the nearly 20 candidates who have either announced their bids or are considering running.

“This is a vastly different scenario than has ever occurred before,” said RNC Communications Director and chief strategist Sean Spicer. “In the past, going as far back as ‘76 or ‘80, it’s always been about getting in the debate — what’s the threshold for getting in a debate? Now it’s about keeping people out.”

Fundraising, campaign activity and some measure of polling are among the criteria being considered. But Spicer said determining the extent to which polling will be a factor — including the actual threshold polling figure the party and its media partners might use to exclude candidates — is “still a work in progress.”

He indicated that the RNC won’t simply be averaging all the latest polls together. They might pick and choose specific polls that are viewed as reliable, pointing to two news organizations with whom they’re partnering, Fox News and CNN — neither of which use automated polling techniques — as commissioning “very comprehensive” work.

But the sheer number of candidates who are likely to enter the race makes using an arbitrary polling threshold — say, 5 percent in national or early-state surveys — even more precarious than usual. And just as debates with 18 or 19 candidates would be unwieldy, pollsters are grappling with what happens when you try to ask voters about a laundry list of more than a dozen candidates on a primary ballot test.

Pollsters always caution that their surveys reflect only a snapshot in time, and with more than eight months until Republicans start casting ballots, it’s still very early in the process. But there’s even more reason to be skeptical of the polls this time around, they say, because of the sheer number of candidates. While Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio are atop the field in most surveys, in many cases the candidates are bunched together so closely to make their advantages statistically insignificant. And reading more than a dozen names to poll respondents and asking them to choose among them can affect the survey results in ways pollsters don’t yet understand.

“It’s less than ideal, regardless of the method,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts national polls for McClatchy and state-level surveys for NBC News. “When it starts getting to double digits, that becomes cumbersome to administer.” ( An early-March McClatchy-Marist survey tested 12 candidates, but omitted such contenders as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former New York Gov. George Pataki and real estate mogul Donald Trump — all of whom could be clamoring for debate slots in August.)

“Ideally, you wouldn’t want to ask 19 or even 14,” said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which tested 14 Republicans last month. “But if they’re being seriously discussed as potential candidates, you put them in.”

In Fox News’ latest poll, conducted last month, the network included 16 different candidates in the ballot test. Rubio, the first-term Florida senator, led the field, with 13 percent of the vote. Including Rubio, there were nine candidates who earned at least 5 percent of the vote, while the other seven candidates were at 2 percent or fewer. But drawing the line there would admit two political neophytes — Ben Carson (6 percent) and Donald Trump (5 percent) — while denying entry to a sitting senator, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham (1 percent); two governors, Ohio’s John Kasich (2 percent) and Jindal (1 percent); the only woman in the field, Carly Fiorina (0 percent); and the longest-serving Texas governor since statehood, Rick Perry (2 percent). Moreover, with a margin of error for these results at plus or minus 5 percentage points, there is no significant difference between the candidates in third place and 12th place.

CNN’s most recent survey, also conducted in April, tested 15 candidates, omitting Trump from the list. “They’re the ones who are really making a serious run at it,” said CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta, in describing which candidates to include.

“There’s some consideration with how much you can read to a respondent without them hanging up on you,” she added.

Gary Langer, who produces polls for ABC News, excluded Trump and Pataki from the network’s late March poll, which it conducted along with The Washington Post. “We evaluate who the candidates are, who are making serious efforts to enter the race,” said Langer.

Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray tested 17 Republicans, adding former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to the mix, in his most recent survey. In his prior survey of the GOP field last December, he asked whom voters would support as an open-ended question, without providing respondents any names of candidates.

“Unless you can name someone off the top of your head, you’re not committed to them,” Murray said.

But ballot tests without a list of names shouldn’t be compared to polls in which the list of candidates is provided because the candidates are likely to have lower scores across the board in the open-ended surveys, with far more voters undecided. “That triples the ‘don’t knows,’” said Murray.

Automated pollsters, which use landline telephones to conduct their surveys, are already forced to cut down the list of candidates to single digits by the number of buttons on a touch-tone phone. Tom Jensen of the Democratic robopolling firm Public Policy Polling — which surveys the GOP field nationally on a monthly basis and conducts state-level polls, too — said they can only test nine candidates, reserving a 10th button for “undecided.”

Six of the nine candidates PPP first included in January 2013 are still a part of the monthly surveys, Jensen said. The three candidates who’ve been dropped: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and Jindal, who is still expected to run for president. PPP has added Carson, Walker and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Even if the robopolls aren’t going to be part of the debate participation criteria, being omitted from any poll can sting a campaign looking for positive press — and these campaigns are not beneath lobbying for inclusion. In 2012, one longshot Republican, former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, pushed hard to be taken seriously.

“Buddy personally called to ask to be included in our polls four years ago,” Jensen said. “He was very pleasant. Because there wasn’t a space constraint, we put him in.”

This time, the real estate on a polling questionnaire is precious — and reserved for serious contenders. Two national pollsters said Trump’s representatives had complained to them about his exclusion from their surveys, including PPP’s Jensen, who described “non-stop calls” from a Trump employee.

“We even had a conversation with her, and she still kept calling,” he said.