Let’s all chill out about the Colorado poll: No one is electing Ben Carson president
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Hillary Clinton trailing Republican rivals in Colorado, which, being a swing state, gets lots of love and attention from pollsters. “Florida Sen. Marco Rubio bests Clinton 52% to 38%, the biggest gap,” CNN explains. “Ben Carson wins a potential head-to-head matchup as well, with a 52% to 38% advantage. And Donald Trump leads 48% to 37%.”
This seems like bad news for Clinton, the Democrats and frankly the nation itself, if all these clowns can best an experienced and competent politician like Clinton. But don’t write off Clinton—or the concept of democracy itself—quite yet. The blunt fact of the matter is that, while primary polling is useful at this stage in the campaign, general election polling this far out from the election is useless.
In 2011, political science professor John Sides, in a q-and-a with the Columbia Journalism Review, explained why we should distrust these kinds of polls that are a full year away from the actual election. “The simplest fact about polling a presidential general election is this: early polls are much worse at forecasting the outcome than later polls,” he explained, since the people being polled don’t really have the same level of information that they’re going to have closer to the election, when they start actually paying attention to the election coverage. (Most voters aren’t breathless political junkies like professional pundits are. Shocking, I know.)
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/18/lets_all_chill_out_about_the_colorado_poll_no_one_is_electing_ben_carson_president/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
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