This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on July 18, 2016 The Republican National Convention is now underway, with the critical question being whether it can reconfigure a race that looks close in some polls but is really an uphill climb for Donald Trump. There’s no question that the Democratic Party is not in particularly good standing right now, with a very large swath of the electorate either disliking or distrusting Hillary Clinton, but the GOP and especially Trump appear to have a greater set of challenges. Keep in mind two misguided approaches to looking at political polls. The first is to cherry-pick polls that confirm your preferences and then dismiss as biased or methodologically flawed any surveys that run contrary to your assumptions. The second offense, the one often committed by journalists, is to assume that the newest poll is right even if it is different from every other survey. Obviously a new survey with findings different from other polls is newsworthy, but it could be an outlier that doesn’t reflect the state of the race. This is why
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