Polling is just name recognition. More coverage = higher polling

[eleganz]

This should be pretty common knowledge here. Trumps received over a billion dollars worth of free coverage, media has been talking about him non stop, you'd think that would somehow be the reason for his never ending climb in polling.

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/silver-datalab-moartrump-1.png?w=610&h=543


If, like most Americans, you’ve been paying only passing attention to the GOP campaign, then pretty much the only candidate you’ll have been hearing about is Trump. According to data compiled by the Media Research Center, Trump has received more network news coverage than Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio combined. So if a pollster calls you and rattles off 17 names, and there are six or seven candidates you like well enough, which name might you mention when asked for your first choice? Possibly Trump, since his name will be top-of-mind. There’s a near-perfect correlation, in fact1 between how much news coverage a candidate has received and where they rank in recent national polls:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/

[r3volution 3.0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8_ahSZF-E4

[cat_woman]

Yep, and add to that the fact two crappy online polls the media would normally laugh at are being taken as credible, because they show Trump with big leads.

[libertyplz]

Not entirely relevant to your topic, but figure it's about polling and not sure where else to post these :p

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Only thing different this go around is that Trump has already been subjected to a lot of attacks, at least by the media, and his polling has only gone up from it. If I remember correctly, those that led at various points in the 2012 cycle caught on and became flavor of the month but didn't last long under the scrutiny. Trump has been under intense scrutiny since he has been in the race. Still interesting to see how past cycles have turned out.

[CPUd]

Yes, many of the polls that do favorability, you can plot name recognition based on the "never heard of this candidate" responses, and it will typically correlate to their rank for the big question. Walker has always been an exception though.