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Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
He might well be the nominee, but it's never over at this stage. Polls don't start mattering for several months yet.
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I agree that I would not conclude anything this early in this particular cycle. Because Trump is a candidate, it can go all sort of ways. I definitely do not believe he has it in the bag yet, a lot to play out.
However, polls (even early ones the year before) are somewhat predictive.
We Analyzed 40 Years Of Primary Polls. Even Early On, They’re Fairly Predictive. | FiveThirtyEight
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In the chart below, for the calendar year before the primaries began, we averaged each candidate’s polls in the first half of the year (January through June) and in the second half of the year (July through December), and then plotted those two averages against the share of votes each person won in the next year’s primaries, for every competitive nomination process from 1972 to 2016. The correlation is pretty strong for both halves of the year,2 though polls from the second half of the year matched the outcomes a little better, which is not surprising — after all, those polls were conducted closer to the start of primary season.
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