Trump…

This is the rare piece on United States elections and the coming November general election. First, over the last twenty years, I covered a lot of US politics. I did a lot of local politics, as well as national politics when it related to California. We stopped doing a lot of local politics because while it matters, people don’t want to pay for it. This is why a lot of newsrooms have moved away from local coverage.

This is a problem. However, this experience allows me to see national politics through a slightly different lens than partisans on either side. While Donald Trump won the open primary in South Carolina, it once again showed a few problems for Trump.

The first is polling. Companies keep putting out bad products because they refuse to change their methods. Over the decades, they moved away from field interviews to relying on phone calls. These are landline calls, which are becoming a dinosaur.

No, the calls are not just to Republicans. Some people wrongly believe this. In an open primary, you will call all likely voters, not just one party. But, if you use landlines, you exclude a considerable part of the potential electorate.

So here is what we had yesterday. Trump way underperformed the polls. So here is the data from the exit polls as well: