Marco Rubio will have his work cut out for him - not particularly helped by having the State party apparatus endorsing Charlie Crist - if this early poll means anything. According to a poll of 300 Republican voters, conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research for the Sachs firm, showed Rubio with only 18 percent of the vote, with Governor Crist at more than 50 percent of the vote (undecideds at 29 percent, and the margin of error being +-6).
While certainly Rubio would prefer to have done better, most political scientists agree that early polls are predictive of very little. And some of you might remember some also ran named Obama badly trailing Hilary Rodham Clinton in the early polls. What are early polls good for? Not quite "absolutely nothing." Politicians can use these early polls as part of their fundraising mechanism, which can in turn work on name ID, which can in turn improve future polls - which can be quite predictive of winners. But there is a lot of "noise" involved in this line of causation - making these early polls not particularly important.
About Me
- Martin J. Sweet
- is a professor, political commentator, and Director of Content for thelaw.tv. Sweet was the 2005 co-winner of the APSA's Corwin Prize for the nation's best dissertation in the area of public law. His book, "Merely Judgment: Ignoring, Evading and Trumping the Supreme Court," is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press in November 2010. Professor Sweet is a regular political contributor for local television and radio stations, and has been interviewed for his political analysis numerous times by the Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Scripps-Howard News Service, as well as the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Daily News, and the Washington Post. Sweet has also been an invited speaker and panel moderator for national and local education, civic, and religious organizations.
