Surveys that are taken months before an election mostly reflect the awareness levels of the candidates. They are never a prediction of the outcome. In fact, an early lead is a sweet poison that puts campaigns to sleep and makes them overconfident. It may prevent them from taking painful decisions or bold moves such as for example carrying out the right inoculation strategy to reduce negative ratings. The support for the leading candidates may be based mostly on the fact that voters don’t know (yet) any of the alternatives. In that sense, I would rather have a client that is running a few points behind in the surveys but is fully engaged than a client that is sitting on an early lead.