MACHESTER, N.H. — We’ll never really know whether Sen. Marco Rubio’s rocky performance in Saturday night’s debate affected his showing in Tuesday’s primary, because none of the New Hampshire polls will be reliable enough to offer a basis for comparison.
In addition to the usual challenges facing pollsters in the modern era — low response rates, cell phone only households, etc. — the closeness of the primary to the Iowa caucuses, coupled with the busy week on the campaign, has created too many variables to get an accurate picture of where the Granite State race stands.
Because the Iowa caucuses were held Monday night and generally three days of polling are needed to get a large enough sample size, the earliest a pollster could have had a poll out reflecting the Iowa results was on Friday. But even then, the race was affected by campaigning in New Hampshire, Donald Trump’s decision to claim that Sen. Ted Cruz stole Iowa, then to move on, and other stories.
That means that going into the debate, it was difficult to know where the race was, and there won’t be enough days of polling after the debate to gauge how it may have affected the outcome. We’ll really have no idea where the race is when voters head to the polls.
Looking at the data we do have, the best we can say is that polling suggests Trump is well ahead, and there’s some sort of traffic jam in the middle with Cruz, Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush. Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson bring up the rear.
Should Rubio secure second place, many people will be tempted to say that his debate performance didn’t hurt him. But there’s no way of knowing, because it’s unclear how he would have done otherwise.
At a Rubio event at a middle school in Bedford Sunday, I spoke to several voters who were concerned about Rubio after seeing the debate, but went to the town hall to see if he could make them feel better. My colleague David Drucker found something similar at an earlier event in Londonderry, where some audience members felt reassured after the town hall meeting.
But the problem is, not every undecided voter who thought Rubio got rattled in the debate will get to see him in person before the Tuesday vote. And it’s impossible to know how many people who were considering him broke against him at the last minute. Even if he ends up finishing in second place, it’s possible he would have done better with a solid debate performance.
So, political junkies will largely be flying blind heading into Tuesday, and — barring a surprise first place finish or an utter collapse — the results won’t settle the debate over whether Rubio’s stumble cost him.
