Bernie Sanders Is Seeing Gains In States That Have Yet To Vote
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-upcoming-primaries_us_571a7d4de4b0d0042da93713
Breaking down the national poll numbers reveals some surprising results.
Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is on the verge of catching up to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, if national polls of the primary are any gauge.
HuffPost Pollsters average, which includes all publicly available surveys, shows Sanders trailing by about 4.3 points, down from a deficit of more than 20 points at the beginning of the year.
National primary polls, however, arent an especially good gauge for a number of reasons. For one, theres no such thing as a national primary states vote individually, and attempts to survey them all at once omit the significant differences between, say, the Iowa caucuses in February and the New Jersey primaries in June. For another, at this point in the calendar, many of the people included in national polls live in states that have already voted rather than those that still have upcoming contests.
National pollsters often dont try to differentiate between those groups, viewing their results as a barometer of political attitudes rather than a tool for predicting whos likely to win. But the NBC/SurveyMonkey tracking poll, which has been following the race since the beginning of the year, was able to look at the divide between the states that have already voted and those that have yet to do so.