Donald Trump is on top in Iowa, Ben Carson is hot on his heels, and Bernie Sanders has flown past Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

That’s the snapshot polls captured this week. It’s a far cry from the Bush-Clinton horse race that many had predicted going into the 2016 campaign season — and it belies conventional wisdom that predicted Trump’s demise after he attacked Fox News host Megyn Kelly after last week’s GOP presidential debate. The results have skeptics asking: Are these numbers the real deal?


Some Republicans have insisted for months that Trump’s meteoric rise in the polls vastly overstates his standing in the race for the GOP nomination because the polls are surveying people who — despite what they tell pollsters — won’t actually cast ballots in their state’s primary or caucus. That argument reached a new crescendo on Wednesday, after a CNN/ORC poll showed the real estate magnate with a significant lead in Iowa, trailed by neurosurgeon Ben Carson. The two first-time candidates were the only ones to register double-digit support.

Campaign pollsters pointed to CNN’s likely GOP caucusgoer sub-sample — 544 voters — as too large, given the overall sample of 2,014 adults. Classifying 27 percent of all adults as likely Republican caucusgoers is questionable, they say, since only about one-in-20 eligible voters take part in the caucuses. Their solution: Pollsters should either only call voters with past evidence of participating in primaries or caucuses — or they should tighten their questions to screen out more voters who tell pollsters they will vote but probably won’t.

But public pollsters disagree, arguing it’s too early to know who is going to show up, and who won’t. And they point to the 2008 Democratic contest as a cautionary tale about making assumptions on voter turnout.

J. Ann Selzer, whose surveys for the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg News are considered the gold standard in Iowa, compared the Trump phenomenon to Obama’s surge immediately before the 2008 caucuses. The Obama campaign invested heavily in persuading and mobilizing independents who had never caucused before. Ultimately, three-in-five attendees, Selzer said, were first-time caucusgoers — something that caught then-Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign by surprise but Selzer had predicted in her final survey, which showed Obama 7 points ahead of Clinton.

The Clinton camp was “blinded to what the Obama campaign was doing in talking to people who hadn’t caucused before,” Selzer said. “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior — oh, until there’s change.”

Selzer’s methodology differs slightly from CNN’s and most other public pollsters. Rather than randomly dialing phone numbers, Selzer does work off a list of registered voters. But her firm does not screen out those who haven’t participated before, and it also calls some independents who say they are planning to attend the caucuses.

Republicans still say the polls would be more accurate if they worked off lists of people who have participated before. But what nearly everyone can agree on is that Trump’s dominance in the polls is impressive. He has led the last 26 independent polls of national Republicans — counting all surveys conducted by live telephone operators, automated phone calls and over the Internet. He’s on top in the four most recent polls in Iowa and the five most recent polls in New Hampshire.

Yet focusing on the polls released over the past five days — essentially just a few scattered data points — is where things get dicey. Overlooked in the clamor of this week’s polls is the fact that no national poll conducted by live interviewers has been released since the debate. Instead, most of the polling action was in the small states that vote first, Iowa and New Hampshire, where polling can be more volatile.

Citizens vote on Election Day at Fire Station #71 in Alhambra, Los Angeles County, on November 6, 2012 in California. | Getty

The lack of national polling not only makes it more difficult to discern whether last week’s debate reshuffled the field — it also has an important practical impact. CNN, the host of the second debate next month, is averaging together all credible polls from mid-July until Sept. 10 to determine which candidates qualify for the debate state. That means eight polls — all conducted before the first debate — are already a part of their average, giving the prime-time candidates from last week an edge in the fight to remain on the main stage and complicating the paths for those looking for a promotion, like Carly Fiorina.

On the Democratic side, while a Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll this week showed Sanders passing Clinton in New Hampshire, other surveys have showed Clinton leading the Vermont senator, albeit by smaller margins than nationally.

Compared to past primary cycles, one poll can generate outsized attention — because there aren’t that many polls so far. Since July 1, there have been only four polls of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, not all of them by widely respected pollsters.

In any case, as campaign veterans often point out, the graveyards of past presidential cycles are filled with one-time frontrunners who flamed out before a single vote was cast: Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann each claimed at least a share of the GOP lead in Iowa four years ago before the caucuses actually took place. Bachmann led two polls in July 2011 but finished last in the Jan. 2012 caucuses.

Four years earlier, on the Republican side, the leaders six months before the 2008 caucuses were Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — with eventual winner Mike Huckabee in the single digits. The same held true for Democrats: There were 16 polls of the Iowa Democratic caucus conducted in July 2007, and Clinton led all of them — by an average of nearly 15 points.

“The mantra of the Iowa caucuses is: Organize, organize, organize — and then get hot in the end,” Selzer said. “Well, [Trump’s] hot now.”