Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore has stuck with the race, and some pollsters have kept asking about him even though the vast majority of the time he gets so little support that his share of respondents rounds to 0 percent. Finally, his stick-to-it attitude has paid off: Gilmore got 1 percent in a Fox News poll last week, good enough to qualify him for tonight’s undercard debate. It’s his first appearance on a debate stage since the first Republican debate almost six months ago, also on Fox News.
HuffPost Pollster has compiled 275 polls of the Republican national primary. Gilmore has been included in 102 of them, the least of any Republican candidate, including the ones who’ve already dropped out. That’s partly because he didn’t formally enter the race until late July, but even since his entry, Gilmore has been asked about less often than any of the candidates who are still in the race. One big reason: Gilmore polled at 1 percent or above in just 14 percent of the polls that asked about him. (Our collection of national primary polls omits Gilmore.)
Given Gilmore’s persistent inability to register with poll respondents, it’s surprising not that so many pollsters have dropped Gilmore, but that more haven’t. “All media pollsters have struggled with how to ask about a list of candidates in the double digits,” Mark Blumenthal, head of election polling for the online-polling company SurveyMonkey, said in an interview. “There is no good way to do it, particularly on the phone. A lot of these names are unfamiliar to a lot of voters, and they can’t hold that many names in their head to get an answer.” Gilmore’s best results have come in online polls — Fox News’s poll was the first conducted with live telephone interviews in which he registered as high as 1 percent.
Harry Enten
Last Dance For Huckabee And Santorum
Welcome to our live blog of the Fox News undercard debate, featuring Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. If you’re a sentimentalist, pay special attention to Huckabee and Santorum: Tonight may be the last time you see either on a national stage this campaign (although they’re going to Donald Trump’s event afterward).
Santorum and Huckabee have bet it all on Iowa: They’re No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in the number of campaign events held in the state. Their all-in-on-Iowa strategy is perfectly reasonable; Santorum won the caucuses in 2012, and Huckabee carried the state in 2008. But neither has caught on this cycle. Huckabee has only 2.6 percent support, according to the FiveThirtyEight Iowa polling average, while Santorum has less than 1 percent and so doesn’t even appear on our chart.
It would take something miraculous in tonight’s debate, or in the few days before Monday’s caucuses, for either to have a chance of winning or even coming close.
Meanwhile, neither is doing well in New Hampshire or South Carolina. Santorum and Huckabee are polling at about 2 percent or worse in both states. So there’s really no path for them after Iowa.
Huckabee has said that he’ll drop out if he finishes outside the top three in Iowa; the same is probably true for Santorum.
Enjoy their company while you can.
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