Keller @ Large: Conflicting polls released 2 weeks before New Hampshire primary
BOSTON - We are exactly two weeks away from the New Hampshire primary, and two new polls from reputable outlets are a study in contrast.
One poll from Suffolk University for the Boston Globe and USA Today has Donald Trump with a comfortable 20-point lead over Nikki Haley. (Disclosure: this writer has a close relative working for the Haley campaign.)
But a University of New Hampshire/CNN survey shows the former president leading Haley by just seven points. How to account for the difference?
New Hampshire primary voters are famous for late-breaking decisions and this race appears to be no exception.
For instance, the Suffolk poll gives Vivek Ramaswamy just two percent of the vote, a reflection, perhaps, of voter reaction to what the website Axios calls the "unraveling" of his campaign. But UNH finds Ramaswamy with eight percent support, a gap outside the margin of polling error. If Ramaswamy supporters are peeling off their man, that seems most likely to be helping Trump, a consistent object of Ramaswamy's admiration. (They're certainly not going to Haley, who Ramaswamy has vilified throughout the campaign.)
But the key similarity between these two polls is the support for Chris Christie, who's at 12% in both surveys. Christie has based his entire candidacy on antipathy towards Trump, and as Haley has moved into second place in both New Hampshire and Iowa, both she and endorser Chris Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, have been arguing that if Christie really wants to stop Trump he needs to drop out and back Haley.
If you look at the polling crosstabs for independents, those ever-crucial swing voters, you can see how Christie may hold the outcome in his hands. In the UNH poll, Haley dominates with independents, and if even half of those who still back Christie were to bail on him it could put her over the top.
Even in the Suffolk poll, where Trump does better with independents, it's the same scenario. If those unenrolled voters want to stop Trump and decide Christie can't win, they could take a huge bite out of Trump's lead by consolidating behind Haley.
And what about Ron DeSantis, the Philadelphia Eagles of the GOP race (fast start, calamitous finish)? He's at eight percent in the Suffolk poll, just five in the UNH survey. When he surfed in last spring on a wave of favorable hype, DeSantis positioned himself as everything Trump supporters love about their man - pugnacity, strength, hard-right positions - without all the negative baggage and election-loss taint. Judging from his collapse in New Hampshire and, to a lesser extent, in Iowa, those voters have decided that given a choice between the original and a knock-off, they prefer the former.