VA-Quinnipiac: Hillary wins Virginia against Christie & Paul

[Mr. Morden]

For Clinton vs. Paul:
age 18-29: Clinton +8
age 30-44: Clinton +19
age 45-64: Clinton +16
age 65+: Clinton +12

A Republican doing better with the youth vote than any other age bracket!

[Mr. Morden]

Also, it looks like, according to the Quinnipiac polling universe, Virginia would most likely be the tipping point state in Christie vs. Clinton, since Christie is doing better than this in both Colorado and Ohio.

[Mr. Morden]

All in all I can now make a general assessment: Hillary Clinton probably wins much like Obama 2012 against Christie and has a landslide victory awaiting against Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and  Paul Ryan. Neither Paul, Rubio, nor Ryan is Presidential, and the polls consistently show this. 

Christie only has ~70% name recognition, and is only losing to Clinton by 5.  If his name recognition matched hers, they'd probably be about even.  And of course, it's only July 2013.  How in the world can you judge "presidential material" just on the basis of being behind by double digits when you haven't yet run a campaign?

[Mr. Morden]

Besides, only the final polls really matter and usually Quinnipiac polls are accurate.

I don't think it's true that only the final polls matter.  You want to actually track the election months in advance, not just predict who's going to win the day before the election.  Problem is that only the final polls can ever really be tested for accuracy.  We have no way of checking whether a poll taken months before the election is accurate.

[Mr. Morden]

How do we test the accuracy of this poll? We can't.

Exactly.  There's no way to test the accuracy of polls that take place well before the election.  And in fact, I think Mark Blumenthal once pointed out that polling from different pollsters tends to converge towards the "right" answer just before an election.  So you could have five different polling firms, which give very different numbers throughout most of the campaign season, and then they all converge on more or less the same result in the final days before the election.  All of the pollsters were then "right" in that their final poll was accurate.  But they were showing different things three months before the election, so which of them was right back then?