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The RNC has declared that to get on stage Aug. 23 for the first debate, a candidate must get 1% in three national polls* or two national and two early state polls*. Candidates also need to have 40,000 donors.
What many observers have missed is that little asterisk after "polls." Not all polls qualify. Actually, most polls don't qualify. It isn't that they are biased or run by amateurs. No, it is something simpler: Their samples are too small. The RNC rule for a poll qualifying is that it needs 800 likely Republican primary voters in the sample. Most live interviewer polls and robo polls have between 1,000 and 1,500 respondents, total. Only online polls typically have more. A poll with 1,500 respondents is likely to have about 500 Democrats, 500 Republicans, and 500 independents. Even if every Republican hops up and down swearing that he or she will vote in the primary, that's only 500 likely Republican voters and the poll does not qualify. A poll would probably need 2,500 respondents to have a shot at producing 800 likely Republican voters. Unless the RNC changes the rules at the last minute, it is likely that none of the candidates other than Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence make the cut simply because there aren't enough qualifying polls.
To see the problem, look at Five Thirty Eight's polling database. Look for Republican primary polls with 800 or more LV. They are scarce on the ground. That's going to be a big problem for many candidates. And summer is not high season for polling, so don't expect too many more before the cutoff of Aug. 21.
As just one example of the problem, Fox ran a horse-race poll recently. It had only 391 likely Republican voters in it, so it wouldn't qualify. Fox wants to make the debate a success, of course. It really doesn't want a situation in which only Trump and DeSantis qualify—and Trump doesn't show up. So it could run a poll and get 3,000 valid respondents in hopes of getting 800 likely Republicans. But that essentially triples the cost of the poll. For its own reasons, it might do it, but a pollster like Marist College, which has been working for The New York Times, probably won't do it and neither will most of the others. If the pollsters don't get bigger samples, will the RNC reduce the requirement? Maybe, but a subgroup with 800 people has a margin-of-error of about 3½%. Small samples will be even worse. The RNC doesn't want polls so small that they don't mean anything, especially since 0.4% means "does not qualify" and 0.5% means "qualifies." This is definitely an issue to watch. (V)