April 14, 2016

Donald Trump Is Now Way Out Ahead of Ted Cruz

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Two days ago—two!—I posted a Pollster chart showing that Ted Cruz had nearly caught up to Donald Trump on a national level. This was based on polling through April 6, and today we have polling results through April 11. Look what’s happened:

Yikes! The head-to-head between Trump and Cruz has gone from 39-38 to 53-25. Trump now has a 28-point lead over Cruz, about as big as any he’s had since the beginning of the year.

Maybe this is just a temporary spike—or, then again, maybe April 6 was the temporary spike. Either way, this is an extraordinary amount of movement for an aggregate measure in just five days. Did something happen on April 6 that I missed?

UPDATE: Sam Wang says this spike is just the effect of one high-end-of-the-range poll (NBC/SurveyMonkey) and one super-high poll (YouGov). I don’t expect aggregates to move so strongly based on just one or two polls, but it looks like he’s right. Those two polls by themselves added 27 points to Trump’s lead. So I guess there’s no need to panic just yet.

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