Palko points to this news article, “The mystery of Vivek Ramaswamy’s rapid rise in the polls,” which states:

Ramaswamy’s strength comes almost entirely from polls conducted over the internet, according to a POLITICO analysis. In internet surveys over the past month — the vast majority of which are conducted among panels of people who sign up ahead of time to complete polls, often for financial incentives — Ramaswamy earns an average of 7.8 percent, a clear third behind Trump and DeSantis.

In polls conducted mostly or partially over the telephone, in which people are contacted randomly, not only does Ramaswamy lag his average score — he’s way back in seventh place, at just 2.6 percent.

There’s no singular, obvious explanation for the disparity, but there are some leading theories for it, namely the demographic characteristics and internet literacy of Ramaswamy’s supporters, along with the complications of an overly white audience trying to pronounce the name of a son of immigrants from India over the phone.”

And then, in order for a respondent to choose Ramaswamy in a phone poll, he or she will have to repeat the name back to the interviewer. And the national Republican electorate is definitely older and whiter than the country as a whole: In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, more than 80 percent of likely GOP primary voters were white, and 38 percent were 65 or older.

‘When your candidate is named Vivek Ramaswamy,’ said one Republican pollster, granted anonymity to discuss the polling dynamics candidate, ‘that’s like DEFCON 1 for confusion and mispronunciation.’

Palko writes:

Keeping in mind that the “surge” was never big (maxed out at 10% and has been flat since), we’re talking about fairly small numbers in absolute terms, here are some questions:

1. How much do we normally expect phone and online to agree?

2. Ramaswamy generally scores around 3 times higher online than with phone. Have we seen that magnitude before?

3. How about a difficult name bias. Have we seen that before? How about Buttigieg, for instance? Did a foreign-sounding name hurt Obama in early polls?

4. Is the difference in demographics great enough to explain the difference? Aren’t things like gender and age normally reweighted?

5. Are there other explanations we should consider?

I don’t have any answers here, just one thought which is that it’s early in the campaign (I guess I should call it the pre-campaign, given that the primary elections haven’t started yet), and so perhaps journalists are reasoning that, even if this candidate is not very popular among voters, his active internet presence makes him a reasonable dark-horse candidate looking forward. An elite taste now but could perhaps spread to the non-political-junkies in the future? Paradoxically, the fact that Ramaswamy has this strong online support despite his extreme political stances could be taken as a potential sign of strength? I don’t know.