Who do you think will win the Republican presidential nomination?
Since July we’ve been running an Insight Poll asking people who they believe will win the Republican nomination. As I’ve noted before, these are polls of center-left voters who rank as ‘opinion leaders’ or ‘influencers’ by a variety of metrics. In a sense, they’re the last people you’d look to for insight on who’s going to be the GOP nominee. But their opinions are valuable because, unlike Republicans, they have no dog in the fight. Since few if any of them are Republicans, they’re not biased by who they’d like to see win. For people who closely follow politics, they’re as close as you get to disinterested observers.
Here below you can see the results of 6 separate polls taken since late July. Each has a sample size of 2000 qualified respondents, except for the final one which has 1500.
One big takeaway of course is the huge drop in expectations for Jeb Bush. 50% in late July, now down under 20%. Scott Walker starts as the second biggest number and then promptly collapsed. Trump explodes but, like the voter preference polls, he seems to have plateaued or perhaps begun to fall himself.
But look at Marco Rubio. He barely showed up in our first polls but now 27% of respondents believe he’ll be the nominee – an assumption that is well ahead of his actual poll numbers but I think shows a pretty good grasp of the dynamics of the race.
