Polling Time in the GOP

Another poll, another group of "leaders" in the race to represent the GOP in the 2016 presidential election.

A Fox News poll puts it at:

1. Chris Christie at 15 percent
2. Jeb Bush and Rand Paul at 14 percent
3. and leading the also rans, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio and several others and 6 percent who preferred "none of the above."

What's this mean?

As the story notes, hardly anything at all. It's just fun. But it's also more than that as we move through the "invisible campaign" period in which seeming electable attracts more money, which makes you seem more electable, which attracts more money, which ... well, you get the idea. You can see the raw results here, if you're dweeby enough to care.

The Fox folks do something nice in the poll details, on page 12 providing the margins of error for various subgroups. Funny, as I was just talking about this in my basic reporting class. Following this, they provide a long list of crosstabs that break out responses by gender and party ID and all the rest, EXCEPT they do it for every question OTHER than the candidate preference questions. No idea why. Weird.

About the only other takeaway from this poll is Ted Cruz has dropped some in support, but even then it doesn't mean a lot because he's a favorite of those who actually vote in the GOP primary. It's early, remember, and such polls are really designed to appeal and inform the political chattering class.