I’ve been wondering for a while who the first pollster would be to stop polling the Republican primary. Today I got my answer:
As candidates jostle to make the cut for the first GOP presidential debate this week, the McClatchy-Marist Poll has temporarily suspended polling on primary voter choices out of concern that public polls are being misused to decide who will be in and who will be excluded.
….“It’s a problem when it’s shaping who gets to sit at the table,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute….“It’s making candidates change their behavior. Kasich is trying to get a big bounce. Rand Paul has a video with a chain saw. Lindsay Graham is hitting cell phones with golf clubs,” Miringoff said. “Now the public polls are affecting the process they’re supposed to be measuring.”
Miringoff is also concerned that candidates may be excluded from the debate due to differences between 10th and 11th place that are so close they’re within the margin of error. I think those concerns are overblown, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. There’s clearly a certain amount of arbitrariness at work here.
I doubt that very many outfits will pull out of primary polling. But a few more might, and of course that also affects which candidates will make the cut. In the end, then, McClatchy might be kidding itself here. There’s just no way for news organizations that make editorial and placement judgments to avoid affecting the events they report on. It might be best to accept that and deal with it openly instead of pretending they can make it go away.
