Strict polling requirements from the RNC wiped out most of the GOP primary field before they could even declare

• The RNC set a number of benchmarks a campaign needs to hit to make the August 23 debate.
• Candidates must poll at 1% or higher in three polls with over 800 likely Republican voters.
• Not many polls have over 800 likely Republican voters, so that'll be harder to hit than some expect. 

Last week the Republican National Committee laid out a set of benchmarks that candidates who hope to get on the debate stage this summer will have to hit in order to merit inclusion. One number in particular seems set to seriously jeopardize the chances of the many campaigns that are on the bubble by severely limiting the number of polls that the RNC will end up counting.

The rules of engagement

First, the rules that the candidates can meet on their own: A candidate needs 40,000 unique donors, with at least 200 donors per state in at least 20 states. If you see shotgun-style online ads for long-shot presidential candidates in your social media feeds in coming weeks, this is likely the number they're trying to satisfy. 

Second, the candidates will have to agree to data sharing, not participating in non-RNC debates, and endorsing the eventual nominee. 

But the big one is the polling requirements. Candidates have to poll at 1% or above in three national polls or, alternatively, poll at 1% in two national polls and then poll at 1% or higher in two polls from early states that include Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. That's a high bar for some campaigns in the increasingly busy bottom of the race, but that's not even the number that's going to screw them. 

A math problem that's going to end some campaigns

The number that has election analysts scratching their head is that the only surveys that count are surveys that have "at least 800 registered likely Republican voters," which is going to be a problem because that's a very large amount of voters and very few polls are hitting that right now.

Most polls aren't even getting close. 

A standard poll of 1,500 voters (give or take) is not going to get you anywhere close to 800 registered likely Republicans, because registered likely Republicans definitely do not compose 53% of the electorate. 

Indeed, when Gallup asked in 2021, 29% percent of voters said they were Democrats and 27% said Republicans, with the balance saying they were independent (albeit most of them leaning one way or another).

Back of the napkin, you'd have to poll something like 3,000 voters to get there, and likely you'd want a bit of cushion as well. Even factoring in the independents who said they leaned Republican, that only gets you to 47%, meaning you'd still have to poll over 1,700 people, plus a cushion. 

That means that while there are plenty of pollsters out in the field right now, the number of qualifying polls is pretty small.

Simply not enough polls for some candidates to have a chance

A perusal of the FiveThirtyEight polling database finds that the overwhelming majority of polls are not actually eligible under the requirements, and only daily tracking polls like the ones produced by Morning Consult are hitting the mark consistently. 

The New York Times' election analyst Nate Cohn found only a handful of polls that had over 800 likely GOP voters, and among those many were funded by the GOP and thus, per subsequent eligibility requirements laid out by the RNC, likely ineligible.  

FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich found only 12 polls delivering 800 likely Republican voters in the entire cycle so far, a number that expands to 20 polls if the requirement is read not as likely GOP voters by rather registered Republicans. Another analysis by Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight found only 7 polls since Jan. 1 that meet the letter of the criteria, and since the RNC is only counting polls that come after July 1, all of this has to happen over just a few weeks. 

Under either scheme, there are simply not going to be very many of those between now and the debate on August 23. That means that beyond the crew consistently polling above 1% — Trump and DeSantis who have garnered the bulk of the support, as well as possibly Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy — Republican candidates are in deep trouble here. 

People within the polling industry who spoke to Insider speculated that they anticipate that some pollsters will increase sample sizes, or alter the manner in which they poll, in order to begin hitting sufficient sample size that would merit their polls' inclusion according to the RNC's benchmarks.

That could help candidates like former Gov. Chris Christie or North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum have enough chances to make the big dance. 

Still, the 800 likely voter benchmark is going to pose problems for candidates not named Trump and DeSantis, especially if future debates have thresholds higher than 1% to merit inclusion.