Poll suggests Trump strength in Florida

A new poll finds Donald Trump leading Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio — in their home state of Florida. 

{mosads}The surprise result comes less than a week after another poll found Bush, the state’s former governor, with a comfortable 12-point lead over Rubio, a GOP senator from the Sunshine state. Trump was 17 points behind Bush in the Maxon-Dixon poll released on Friday. 

The new poll, by Florida-based St. Pete Polls, was released on Wednesday and found Trump leading the entire field at 26 percent — 6 points ahead of Bush.

Conventional wisdom has been that Florida will be dominated by Bush and Rubio. In fact, while Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has publicly said he’ll play everywhere, RealClearPolitics reported that he told donors he won’t heavily invest in trying to topple his Floridian rivals.

The Mason-Dixon poll adheres to this thinking, showing Trump far behind Bush and also finding more limitations to the potential of a Trump rise in the Sunshine State. Almost six out of 10 voters said they would not consider voting for Trump, with 27 percent seriously considering him.

The two polls used different methodologies that yielded these starkly different results. 

Both polls targeted registered Republican voters, but Mason-Dixon queried participants by telephone while St. Pete Polls used an email opt-in poll based off of addresses it received from voter rolls. 

While randomized dialing selects the field from a random set of Florida registered voters, email opt-ins restrict that initial pool to only those that have agreed to participate. That could have an impact on the results, as an energized Trump supporter may be more likely to opt-in than another Republican who will still vote come primary day.  

Web-based polls also reach a very different demographic than telephone polls. A 2010 survey by Scarborough Research found that about 30 percent of South Florida residents don’t have regular Internet access, and 21 percent don’t have a computer, according to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel story from 2011.

The state has a significantly higher amount of senior citizens than the national average who might not be as computer savvy as younger Americans.

The St. Pete poll says that it weighted demographics in order to match the characteristics of the “active Republican primary election voter population,” a common way for all polls to deal with a sample that isn’t perfectly representative. 

Matt Florell, the president of St. Pete Polls, told The Hill on Wednesday that since it receives its emails from state voter information, the group is “confident” in its results.

While this is one of the first email-only polls the group has used, Florell said he has been comparing email and phone results in previous polls over time and found that the results were very similar.

He added that recent Federal Communications Commission policies make it more difficult for groups to use programs to automatically randomize dialing, so the group decided to move forward with email polling instead.

The St. Pete poll hit a sample of almost 92 percent white, non Hispanic and 5.5 percent Hispanic, while a Pew Research Center analysis found that Hispanics make up 11 percent of the state’s GOP electorate. The poll says it weighted those results to be reflective of the population, but that process seems to have barely changed the results.