Nevada is a famously tough state to poll. It has caucuses, it has a transient population. It has a huge portion of people who work strange hours.
The result is we have exactly one potentially reliable poll of Nevada. Conducted by Gravis, it’s an entire week old. The other poll that’s kind of recent is one of those 6.5-percent-margin-of-error jobs from CNN, making it meaningless.
The Gravis poll found Donald Trump way ahead of Ted Cruz, 39 percent to 23 percent with Marco Rubio at 19 percent.
This being only one poll, that 4 point lead Cruz holds over Rubio needs to be considered vapor. Anything could dry it up: turnout operations, weather in one part of the state, polling sample error and especially any movement in the past week.
In short, from the polling we have, we can guess that Trump will win, and Rubio and Cruz will battle for second. But in recent years, the polling has been 20-plus points off. So, yeah, we don’t really know.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
