Trump, Walker Lead Fifth Kristol Clear Straw Poll

I’ve broken down the results from our latest straw poll into two groups. The first consists of the 2,000 or so people who responded within 24 hours to the announcement of the poll in last week’s newsletter. I’m going to call these respondents “Core TWS,” because the only way they would have have had access to the poll at that point is by being a newsletter subscriber, or (in just a few cases) by having been forwarded the newsletter by an original recipient.

Late Tuesday morning, we put the survey up on our website, as we’ve done each time we’ve done a poll. This expanded the universe of people who knew about the survey beyond newsletter recipients–first to weeklystandard.com  readers, but then of course to anyone who linked to the post or directed others to the post online. There’s some evidence that a few campaigns called attention to the poll and urged supporters to vote, as they were entitled to do. In any case, by the end of the week we had about 8,000 respondents, whom we’ll call the broader TWS community or “Broader TWS.”

I have no view as to which group is more reflective or predictive of the GOP primary electorate as a whole, and I intend no judgment of preference for either group: We love our newsletter subscribers and our website readers equally! But the differences in the results are somewhat interesting. 

“Core TWS” respondents remains loyal to Scott Walker, with decent support for Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, John Kasich and Jeb Bush. Among “Broader TWS” poll-takers, Trump takes the lead, Walker holds second and Cruz moves up to a strong third. Make of that what you will. One finding common to both groups is the strength of Carly Fiorina–who, it appears, won’t be on the prime time stage Thursday night. Perhaps she can use her considerable rhetorical skill to exploit the foolish and unfair (I think) debate rules that led to her exclusion (and the exclusion of other worthies) from prime time, and turn lemons into lemonade.

In any case, here are the results, both for “Core TWS” and “Broader TWS.” The first number in each case is the percentage of first place votes for that candidate, the second is the percentage of ballots on which the candidate received either a first, second or third place ballot (all ballots).

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Santorum, Graham, and Pataki each received fewer than 1% of first place ballots and 3% overall.

Mull over and interpret these results as you choose. Or not. Or just root for Joe Biden to get in the race on the Democratic side. And if Biden, why not Kerry? And if Kerry, why not Gore? And if all these has beens run–why not Elizabeth Warren, who I suspect could beat them all?

It could be a fun year.