With the Iowa caucuses just days away, most polls continue to show Donald Trump with a mammoth lead.
Real Clear Politics' compilation of polls has Trump at 53.3% of the vote in Iowa. With 17.2%, Nikki Haley is in second, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (15.2%) and Vivek Ramaswamy (6.8%), who have long tied momentum to their door-to-door efforts on the ground in the state, trail behind her.
For months, Republican primary contenders have ignored the numbers that favor the former president in such a large way. Now, there is a new poll in town.
Robert Salvador, CEO of DigiBuild and an advisor to Gov. DeSantis, says his poll is conducted in more modern ways. It has Trump at 40%, DeSantis at 34%, Haley at 16%, and Ramaswamy at 10%. Chris Christie was polling at less than 1% before he announced his exit from the race on Wednesday.
"I was going to release this poll no matter where DeSantis stood," Salvador told American Family Radio Thursday.
Explaining that his group has worked on taking a fresh look at polling methods, he told show host Jenna Ellis their new approach led them to heavy use of artificial intelligence (AI) and includes reading the body language of potential voters.
"Our thesis was that there's so much more that people say in what they're not directly saying to people about politics," Salvador told Ellis. "People may have an underlying thought or feeling about someone that is expressed but not expressed directly."
His company was able to use technology to look at "the many data points that are out there" both digitally and in traditional polling methods. The result was a poll that is "a more complete picture."
"Today, I announce we're releasing the first-ever AI-created poll," he posted on X January 2. "Pollsters, you're on notice. Better tech is going to disrupt you."
"There's a reason Amazon Prime knows your buying habits better than anyone, even yourself. Log in and watch it tell you everything you like in life," Salvador wrote in that same post. "Big data and things like AI/ML can crunch data and make better assumptions than biased, pay-to-play, non-mathematically sound polls."
He says his poll painted the clearest picture of Christie's floundering campaign.
"We were the only ones that showed Christie with no noticeable support," the pollster told Ellis. "If you look at the Des Moines Register, they showed him at like 4%. Trafalgar showed him at like 3%, and ours showed him under 1%. And obviously, he's dropped out."
Salvador compared his poll to "MoneyBall in sports," referencing the story of former Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, who emphasized statistics like on-base percentage to build a winning team on a cash-strapped budget. Beane was the subject of the 2011 movie based on author Michael Lewis' book.
The DigiBuild CEO pointed out that traditional polls use inefficient data and often misrepresent their inaccurate findings.
"As we've seen in the past, these polls are accurate almost never," he said. "They've been wrong so many different times."
Before the 2016 presidential election, for example, some of the last polls from Fox News, CBS, and The Economist showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by four points. NBC/Survey Monkey had her ahead by seven points.
"We set out to create a poll that used some of the traditional polling methods, because the statistics behind those are right, but they're misused," Salvador explained. "Polls are taken from limited samples, or they get biased data, then that is presented on TV or big media as if it's representing the truth."
Promising more specifics at a later date, he wrote on X that big names in the GOP support him and are partnering with him on this.
"We think this is definitely going to be a better polling method going forward, because it just uses technology, and I think that's going to be best for the Republican landscape, for the people of the United States, and for the fairness of elections in general," Salvador told Ellis.
"We should all want the most information we can get about these candidates to make a good decision, and that's what we've done with our poll," he assured her.
