One recent poll shows Ted Cruz winning Indiana by 15 points.
Another shows Trump up by 17.
What’s going on here?
Cruz is probably not 15 points ahead
The only survey giving Cruz a lead at all comes from the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics. There are plenty of reasons to doubt this one.
First of all, it is drastically different from every other poll. RealClearPolitics has six recent polls up, and Trump leads in all six polls, and beyond the margin of error in five of six polls.
Second, this is the second-smallest sample (400 likely voters), and it’s the oldest. The poll, oddly, was conducted over a 15-day stretch, from April 13-27.
A hint of a Trump surge this week
Check RealClearPolitics’ aggregation of polls (they don’t include the Downs poll), and you’ll see a hint of a Trump climb in Indiana. Trump averaged just below 40 percent in the three older polls, and he’s in the mid-40s in the three newer polls.
A week ago, Trump emphatically won five northeastern states, and the “inevitability” talk began in the media.
Trumpmentum = Anti-Trumpers staying home?
There are hints that conservatives and moderates who dislike Trump have begun to lose heart and lose motivation to vote, as Nate Silver posited last week. This would be actual “momentum”: Trump’s wins dampen the spirits of non-Trumpers, thus they stay home.
If this theory of Trumpmentum is correct, it would help explain why Trump so dramatically outperformed the polls last week. It would also suggest that the two recent polls — Gravis and WSJ — showing Trump up 15 and 17 points are not crazy.
That said, Gravis’ poll (showing a 17-point Trump lead) is the smallest sample size of the bunch.
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.
