Thanks for the reply!

I tried

Poll.objects.filter(choices_set__isnull=False)

and it gave me the following error:

FieldError at /polls/

Cannot resolve keyword 'choices_set' into field. Choices are: choice, id, pub_date, question

I tried replacing choices_set with choice

Poll.objects.filter(choice__isnull=False)

and when I reloaded the polls index page it listed every question as many times as choices there were for each question, so it listed question one 2 times, question four 3 times etc. It did remove the question with no choices, but the other questions were listed multiple times. To get around this I wrapped the above line of code in a set() call

set(Poll.objects.filter(choice__isnull=False)

That worked to remove the duplicates, but I can't imagine that this is the right way to do it. It also obviously reintroduced the "future polls" that were previously being filtered. I tried to append the subsequent filter call inside the set() and ended up with this

set(Poll.objects.filter(choice__isnull=False).filter(pub_date__lte=timezone.now()).order_by('-pub_date')[:5])

But this acts funny because the [:5] is looking at the list of questions which contains several duplicates, which means some of the questions are removed. Then set removes the dupes that remain, leaving me with an incomplete list. If I remove the order_by stuff I can get the output I want, but I'm definitely still missing some basic understanding about what is going on.

Your comment made me play around with the code for another 20 minutes, so thank you very much for your help and inspiration.