How's Trump Doing?

Is Trump . . . Fading?

On the eve of the Democratic Debate does anyone really give a crap what Lincoln Chafee thinks? His platform includes moving America to the metric system--what could be less relevant? No, the question The Omnivore was asked was: "How is Donald Trump doing?"

It's actually an interesting question. Moreso than "How's Lincoln Chafee doing?" anyway. Let's look!

Donald Trump's current poll average:

This looks . . .  pretty good--he took a hit--but he's going back up. However, let's slice and dice this a little. Here's the same frame with only live polling included (no IVR or Internet):

In this view he hasn't recovered yet. And there was one poll where he was actually losing badly to Carson. Let's flip it: ONLY INTERNET POLLING:

He's a HERO--now, don't be cynical--Internet polling doesn't HAVE to be bad. YouGov did well last cycle. What does this look like with ONLY pollsters who scored an A or B+ on 538's list of pollsters?

So that's good (for Trump)! But there are three categories of voter-samples: All Adults, Registered Voters, and Likely Voters. Here's everything, All Adults:

That's not so bad. Let's see the most restrictive: Likely Voters.

Huh--well, that's okay.

What Does The Polling Tell Us?

The key things here are not just what Trump is doing--but what everyone else is doing. Carson really is rising--and fast. He may not be a fluke. Fiorina seems to be burning out. Jeb is in real decline--and Cruz, despite savvy positioning, isn't really evidencing hidden strength. In other words, Trump's for real. Still.

Let's look at one more thing:

This is a media attention graph from the Atlantic. It tracks the time the candidates get on TV. Here we see . . . kinda the same thing: Trump in the lead--a drop--but a big of a pick-up, Jeb crashing to earth, Fiorina rising and falling back. No one cares about Rubio or Cruz right now . . .and Ben Carson? He's coming up.

Correlation is not causation--but a case can be made that Trump, so long as he remains on TV a whole bunch, is going to be a contender.

Conclusions

The Omnivore has long thought that people waiting for Trump to burn out were in for a long wait. This seems to confirm that his major super power--super media attention--is still in force. So long as he can free-ride on the world's messaging machine he's going to be tough to beat.