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.
