Super Tuesday results reveal erroneous polling

WASHINGTON—Businessman Donald Trump solidified his standing as the Republican front-runner on Super Tuesday, but he also performed well below expectations. The biggest reason why: errant polling.

Many political pundits predicted Trump would win 10 Super Tuesday states and have an outside shot at challenging Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in his home state. Instead, Trump won seven states, lost four, and came within three percentage points of losing three more.

Not all states had enough surveys to compile an average of polls, but in the six that did, Trump underperformed in half of them.

The biggest polling whiff came in Oklahoma, where the RealClearPolitics average showed Trump ahead by 11.4 percentage points. Cruz, with over 34 percent of the vote, finished six points ahead of Trump, who only edged Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida by two points for second place.

In Texas, where Trump was supposedly closing the gap on Cruz, the freshman senator trounced Trump by 17 points, almost doubling his average polling advantage.

Trump’s polling lead in Virginia was nearly 15 points, but Rubio lost by only 2.8 points. And in Minnesota, where polling was sparse, Rubio led Cruz by two points and Trump by five in January—the last published survey before the primary. On Tuesday, Rubio beat Cruz by eight points and Trump by almost 16.

Aside from skewed polling, Super Tuesday results also illustrate how surveys, no matter how accurate, can’t account for late deciders, who have consistently split against Trump. In Virginia, a plurality of late deciders broke for Rubio, while in Texas they went for Cruz.

In Vermont, a February survey found Trump with support from 32 percent of respondents, good for a 15-point lead over Rubio, but 27 percent remained undecided. On election day, Ohio Gov. John Kasich surged 20 percentage points to finish only 1,325 votes behind Trump.

The disparity in polling and final results is not only relevant to wins and losses, but also to the delegate count going into the Republican National Convention in July. Despite Trump’s win in Vermont, Kasich’s strong finish allowed him to evenly split the state’s 12 available delegates.

Overall, Trump has 319 delegates, about one-quarter of the 1,237 he needs to clinch the GOP nomination. Cruz has 226 delegates, and Rubio has 110. If no candidate reaches the 1,237 threshold, Republicans will convene in Cleveland this July for the party’s first contested convention in decades.

“Trump is still the front-runner and likely to remain in that position, but a contested convention has become more likely,” David Bernstein wrote Wednesday for The Washington Post.

The unreliable polling helps explain why none of the trailing candidates wants to leave the race. While Trump holds big leads in many upcoming states, most states except Florida have seen limited polling. Published surveys often show large margins of error and/or many undecided voters.