As we close out the year, we’ll take a look at the final polling as it comes in (I expect a dead zone for a while as I doubt many were polling over Christmas) and I fully expect to see a flood in January as we get ready for the actual voting to begin.
Today, every candidate can find something to hang their hat on, though the overall story is that Clinton remains the prohibitive favorite both in Iowa and nationally, while New Hampshire remains incredibly close.
THE STATES
Iowa
Gravis (Fivethirtyeight rating C)
Clinton 49
Sanders 31
O’Malley 10
The last Gravis poll was done in conjunction with One America News, so this isn’t necessarily a direct comparison, but there is some good news for Sanders here despite being 18 points behind Clinton. In the last Gravis poll, Clinton led by a fairly implausible 32 point 57-25 margin. That means that Clinton is down 8 (and below 50) and Sanders is up 6. That 14 point shift in the margin isn’t enough to make the race particularly competitive, but showing that much movement in a garbage poll like Gravis could be a sign of Sanders making a move in the state that is meaningful even if we ignore the margins themselves. O’Malley’s ten points here is also the best he’s ever shown in the state. I only include Gravis because I include everything, but they are a truly shitty pollster, far worse than their fivethirtyeight grade would suggest.
New Hampshire
American Research Group (Fivethirtyeight rating C-)
Clinton 46
Sanders 43
O’Malley 3
The somewhat appropriately acronymed ARG is, perhaps, an even worse pollster than Gravis (as their rating suggests) but their results here are not TOO far off what other pollsters are finding- despite showing the first lead for Clinton from any pollster since the very beginning of December.
Most polling has this as a close race between the frontrunners, and this poll isn’t different in that respect. That said, this is their first poll in New Hampshire (the first I recall seeing from them anywhere this cycle, in fact) so we’ve got no baseline to compare this to. Throw it on the pile, it won’t change the averages much anyways, and take it with an entire salt mine until some other legitimate pollsters can back it up or tear it down.
NATIONAL
Rasmussen (Fivethirtyeight rating C)
Clinton 46
Sanders 30
O’Malley 7
Everyone’s favorite Republican pollster, Rasmussen, returns with a poll showing a closer race than other pollsters. They also claim that there is movement from their previous polls, but they didn’t actually do much of a release on what those polls said at the time. Anyways, from their report, their mid-November poll had Clinton up 50-29. That change is not particularly large, but seeing Clinton below 50 and headed downwards is some good news Sanders can cling to in a race that has been largely static at the national level for quite some time.
YouGov/Economist (Fivethirtyeight rating C+)
Clinton 53
Sanders 39
O’Malley 4
This poll shows some improvement for Sanders over their last poll from early December, when Clinton led 56-35. This has been a pretty consistently good poll for Sanders for the last few months, and his 39% is the best showing he’s had in any national poll. Sanders is 9% ahead of where he is in the polling aggregate, so we’d have to see some more polling before we start talking about Sanders legitimately breaking past the 30% ceiling he’s been stuck around for the past few months. Sadly the C+ is the highest grade we get from any pollster today, so we’ll have to take all this information with some salt and the larger context of the race.
Ipsos/Reuters Tracker Update
Clinton 58
Sanders 31
O’Malley 4
Clinton continues to show strength in the weekly release of this poll. It had been pretty swingy for a while, but has remained a bit steadier recently. The last weekly release was similar with a Clinton lead of 58-29.
Besides the weekly Wednesday releases, Ipsos/Reuters releases their day by day results of the five day averages. We have quite a few days to update, but the news has been pretty consistently bad for Sanders ever since the 51-36 poll was hailed by some Sanders partisans as a “harbinger” of where the race was headed. Note that these results are the average of the past five days of polling, not the results for the day’s interviews only.
| 58 | 55 | 55 | 58 | 59 | 60 |
| 32 | 32 | 33 | 31 | 30 | 28 |
| 4 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| +26 | +23 | +22 | +27 | +29 | +32 |
Besides a dip early in the week, Clinton has been strong and rising for the last few days. This poll, like YouGov’s is done completely on the internet and should be taken with a lot of salt.