I’m Not Buying the Utah Poll by Y2 Analytics Showing Cruz Up +24

Y2 Analytics did a poll in Utah showing Ted Cruz up by 24%. I have Cruz winning Utah, but I don’t think he will get 50% of the vote. The poll shows Kasich in second place with 29% of the vote and Trump 3rd at 11%. I believe the order of finish will be Cruz, Kasich and Trump, but Trump will get more than 11% and Kasich won’t get 20%.

In reading the story in the Salt Lake Tribune, it mentions Scott Riding. Looking up som information on who this guy is, Linked-in says he is:

Scott Riding

Managing Partner at Y2 Analytics

Salt Lake City, Utah

Research

Current	Y2 Analytics
Previous	Jeb 2016, Y2 Analytics, TargetPoint Consulting
Education	Brigham Young University

Up until last month Scott worked for Jeb Bush. And taking a look at his Twitter feed, he has a lot of pro Bush tweets and re-tweets and a lot of anti-Trump tweets and re-tweets. Natural for a guy working for Jeb Bush, I suppose. But he began re-tweeting pro Cruz tweets on February 24, just 4 days after Jeb suspended his campaign.

So this guy that conducted the poll is anti-Trump, a former Bush employee and prior to this poll, found anything positive about Cruz worth re-tweeting.

The SLT report also states:

Scott Riding with Y2 Analytics said it appears that a bulk of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s supporters went to Cruz after he dropped out earlier this week.

“It is fascinating to see how close Cruz is to wrapping it up,” he said. “It is also surprising how discouraged Republicans are with the direction of the national party.”

The poll found that 81 percent of respondents said the Republican Party had gotten off on the wrong track and 64 percent said Trump would make the party weaker if he became the nominee.

Only 29 percent of the respondents promised to vote for Trump in a general election, while 25 percent said they would write in another candidate, 15 percent said they’d vote for a third-party candidate and 7 percent said they’d back the Democrat.

“It is fascinating to see how close Cruz is to wrapping it up”.
Seriously? has Riding looked at the delegate count? And the remaining delegates?

And the last line of the story tells me a lot

Y2 Analytics did not poll in Utah’s Democratic caucus.

You don’t say.

Utah is a “winner take all” state, but only if one candidate gets more than 50%. Otherwise, the delegates are split proportionally. And they are split evenly among the candidates who receive more than 15%. With the winner getting the benefit of the rounding.

So if Cruz gets >50%, he will win all 40 delegates. However, if he does not hit the 50% mark, the delegates are evenly divided among all of the candidates with at least 15% of the total. Which means if Cruz gets 49% and Trump gets 15% and Kasich comes in somewhere in between, Cruz will get 14 delegates and Trump and Kasich will get 13 delegates each.

Strange how this poll places Cruz above the magic 50% mark and Trump below the 15% threshold.

I believe we are looking at the 14-13-13 split as all three get above 15% and no one reaches 50%.

Y2 Analytics is, by my research, a partisan polling outfit that was with Jeb Bush until he quit. And there is evidence that they are both Anti-Trump and pro Cruz. It cannot be determined if they were paid to conduct this poll, what the internal data was, how the poll was weighted, what areas were called, etc. etc.

It is entirely possible that this poll was conducted properly and intended to measure, rather than influence voting. But there are far too many partisan attributes to the people conducting the poll to say for sure it is not biased.

You glean from this poll what you will, but I’m not buying it. And I believe that as more polls are releases – and I am sure we will see some tomorrow – we can see if this poll is an outlier or not.

But as it was the only poll released in time for the Sunday Political Shows, I am sure the networks will be buzzing about it.

We will know for sure on Tuesday. Or Wednesday.