On Saturday, the presidential election heads to largely uncharted territory.

After starting in Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters are screened near continuously for months — if not years — before their nominating contests, Republicans next face judgment in South Carolina on Feb. 20, where the polling blitz started only recently. That same morning, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders square off in Nevada, where a lack of polling has left the candidates relatively in the dark ahead of the Democratic caucuses.


There have been only two public surveys in Nevada this week, and pollsters warn that the caucuses — a system only recently implemented in the state and typically attended by very few Nevadans — are nearly impossible to predict. That's frightening for those wondering whether Clinton can sustain her Nevada firewall or whether Sanders’ momentum can bring a surge of young voters to the caucuses.

“The most important thing is to understand what the electorate is going to look like,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who polled for Sen. Harry Reid's successful 2010 reelection bid. “That’s hard in an off-year [general election]. It’s very hard in a primary. And it’s excruciatingly difficult in a caucus. And it’s even more difficult in a caucus that’s relatively new.”

Amid that perfect storm for poor polling, the campaigns are forced to attempt to project and model the elusive universe of likely caucus-goers. But for public pollsters whose reputations are on the line with each primary or caucus, many chose to ignore Nevada and focus only on South Carolina.

The situation in South Carolina is less murky, thanks to a surge of surveys since pollsters uprooted from New Hampshire. This week has brought at least five reliable polls in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary (and another dozen of varying quality). The list of major news organizations and academic institutions that polled South Carolina this week was robust: NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist, Fox News, Monmouth University, Bloomberg Politics and CNN/ORC.

But only CNN also surveyed the Democratic race in Nevada.

“The number of people who are going to show up is so low,” said Monmouth pollster Patrick Murray, “I’d probably be better off going to Nevada myself and knocking on doors than [telephone] polling.”

The extremely limited Nevada polling — combined with both candidates’ pitched campaigning — points to a neck-and-neck race. The CNN/ORC poll showed Clinton with just a 1-point lead over Sanders. Another survey, an automated-telephone poll from Gravis Marketing, showed Clinton with a slightly larger advantage.

But there are reasons to be skeptical of both surveys’ predictive capacities. First, the Gravis poll: Automated polls, otherwise known as interactive-voice response surveys, are not permitted to call voters on cellphones. But nearly half of all adult Nevadans live in households with only wireless phones, according to new data released this week by the National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks the rate at which Americans are substituting landlines for cellphones.

The number is likely quite higher for Democratic caucus-goers: Other studies show younger and non-white Americans, who trend more Democratic, are significantly more likely to give up their landlines than older and white Americans. And the new state-by-state data set goes only through 2014, so the overall number is likely higher, anyway.

“The robopolls are ignoring the majority of the vote,” Mellman said.

As for the CNN/ORC poll, it did survey voters on cellphones. But there are concerns the poll could be both too broad and too shallow.

CNN/ORC randomly dialed landline and cellphone numbers and asked respondents whether they were registered to vote, whether they were likely to vote, whether they’ve voted in past elections and whether they’ve been paying attention to the campaign. Based on that, the pollsters determined that 282 of the 1,006 adults they surveyed were likely to participate in the Democratic caucuses.

That 282-voter sample size is small, meaning that 6-point margins of error apply to both candidates’ vote shares. At the same time, the 28-percent participation rate is obviously too high. In 2008, when Democrats drew a record 118,000 voters to the caucuses, it was still only 9 percent of the overall number of Nevadans on the voter rolls at the time (and an even lower percentage of voting-age Nevadans, which includes those who aren’t registered to vote).

But that doesn’t mean the poll is including the wrong voters. Given his apparent momentum, it’s possible Sanders’ voters will be more motivated to caucus on a Saturday morning. On the other hand: Sanders’ reliance on younger voters, who are generally less reliable in terms of turnout, could tip the scale to Clinton.

There are other factors that raise questions about whether the Nevada polls can assemble the right mix of voters. Mellman recalled the 2010 Nevada Senate race between Reid — his client and the then-Senate majority leader — and Republican Sharron Angle. The public polls showed Angle with a slight advantage, but Reid won by nearly 6 points.

The problem, Mellman said, is most pollsters were unable to cobble together the right voters to make up the likely electorate. And that is going to be even more difficult in the caucuses this year — both for Democrats on Saturday and Republicans next Tuesday.

“Who’s going to be there is a big mystery, and anybody who knows for sure is making it up,” said Mellman.

And even if a pollster can peg the right components of the electorate, reaching those voters is more difficult in Nevada. First, in populous Clark County, a significant number of voters work less predictable hours in the casino and hospitality industries. That’s why — unlike in other states, where pollsters can call voters when they’re more likely to be home at night — it’s essential to call during the day as well.

“Work schedules in Nevada are different than in a lot of places,” Mellman said, “and that’s something that you have to take into account, too.”

There are also language issues: 14 percent of Nevada caucus-goers in 2008 were Hispanic, and pollsters might miss some of these voters if they don't offer interviews in Spanish.

Moreover, the voter lists on which campaign pollsters (and some public pollsters) depend are less reliable in Nevada, said Murray, who has limited Monmouth’s polls to voters on the rolls rather than dialing phone numbers at random.

Another major complication: On the Democratic side, pollsters would have a hard time confirming whether their Nevada numbers were correct after Saturday. That’s because, like in Iowa, the Nevada Democratic Party won’t report the raw vote count; it will report the number of county convention delegates (out of a total of 12,359 delegates) won by each candidate.

Pollsters have instead focused on South Carolina, where Republicans will vote Saturday, and Democrats will take their turns a week later.

The South Carolina GOP polls are mostly consistent: Donald Trump leads, with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio battling for second place. (Though the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll out Friday showed Cruz stalking Trump for first place.) In a close fight for fourth place are Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Ben Carson.

Public pollsters said they were seeing, despite a fury of campaign twists and turns over the past few days — Trump’s feud with Pope Francis, GOP Gov. Nikki Haley’s endorsement of Rubio, Kasich’s viral hug video — less instability in the electorate leading up to South Carolina than before Iowa or New Hampshire.

“With each successive contest, we’re seeing less volatility,” said Monmouth’s Murray.

But Marist pollster Lee Miringoff pointed to some of these events and wondered if they won’t produce last-minute swings that the polls can’t pick up.

“I just think that there’s a lot of noise to poll into. That doesn’t mean that the voters are flopping all over the place,” Miringoff said. “But voters may start picking sides in ways they haven’t [thus far].”