Earlier this year, we published a three-part series on how well primary polls conducted in the calendar year before a presidential election predict the outcome. Our analysis, which covered more than 40 years of primaries, found that early polls are somewhat predictive of who eventually wins the nomination, especially when they’re adjusted for how well known a candidate was at the time.
So now that we’re halfway through the calendar year before the 2020 election, we decided to replicate that analysis for the current electoral cycle — we used polls conducted between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2019, to calculate a candidate’s (or potential candidate’s) polling average and then adjusted it based on how well known they are (measured on a slightly subjective five-tier scale, which is represented by the black boxes in the table below, where more boxes means higher name recognition). CONT.
Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight