YouGov Poll oversample

This is a summary of a YouGov/Economist Poll conducted October 22-26, 2016. The sample is 1376 Registered Voters with a Margin of Error of ±3.1%.

I've just analyzed some numbers of the YouGov poll which shows a lead for Hillary by 5 points. But, when you look at the internals, you see some very encouraging numbers for Trump. Like most polls, he's leading in independents by approximately 15 points (14 in this poll). According to Gallup's last 5 months of polling, the general electorate is comprised of almost 40% independents. This should be incredibly encouraging alone. This poll surveyed 33% independents, which is likely an undersampling, though admittedly possibly a good guess since they are polling likely voters, not registered voters. But here's the kicker. Of their likely voters, they polled 41.4 % Democrats and 25% Republicans. This is a full 16% oversampling! Accordin to the average of Gallup's polling of the last 5 months the Democrats, including leaners, have about a 4% edge this election. Even if the Democrats have a 6 point turnout advantage, the oversampling suggests Trump would be ahead by 5 points! I understand it comes down to the electoral college, but a 5 point lead nationally would likley translate into a electoral college victory as well.

I have looked at Cornell University Roper Center analysis of past elections D / R / I splits.

For 2004 it was 37 D 37 R 26 I
2008 39 D 32 R 29 I
2012 38 D 32 R 29 I

To be conservative, let’s assume: 37 D 34 R 29 I
Assume 90 / 10 split for each party. Indies go to Trump by 57 / 43.

Trump wins 51 / 49. But, I believe it will be better than D+3 for Trump.

I agree, it should be narrower this year. According to Gallup’s numbers, it’s narrowed by about 1.5 points. That’s just general affiliation...not likely voters, however. But the trend is in the right direction. Now, even Democrats aren’t happy about their candidate and the enthusiasm gap is significant this year.

ok I am paranoid ....

I have been flipping between cnn, fox, Bloomberg and msnbc. They to all degrees are claiming that HC is in the lead ... but folks don’t know the impact of the weekend news.

However, especially cnn (and their all knowing analysts) seem to indicate that DT although narrowing is still behind.

What do these (idiots) know that we don’t?

Nothing - one problem is that they for some reason all like the Real Clear Politics average of polls, which lags the real world - it includes polls from up to two weeks ago and thus doesn’t keep up with what’s going on right now - in addition it gives too much weight to outlier polls which distort how large the differences between the candidates is - so the size of Clinton’s lead was undoubtedly exaggerated by the ABC poll which had her ahead by 14 points last week, and it doesn’t yet reflect that her lead in that same poll is now down to only one point - today the RCP average is down to three, and soon all those commentators are going to have to start admitting that the race is at least even - another thing is that all the networks really want to see Hillary win - so they resist giving any credit to Trump as long as they can, and even hope that the more they say Hillary’s winning the more it will help her cause by energizing her followers and discouraging Trump’s - and all the pollsters seem to be using turnout models from past presidential years when Democrat voters outnumbered Republicans by a few percentage points in the final vote - this year is likely to be quite different though, with Hillary very unlikely to be able to pull as many minorities and young people who turned out to vote for the cult figure Obama, and Trump’s voters much more excited about voting than many Republicans in years past when McCain and Romney were on the ticket - the turnout this year is likely to be of equal percentages of Democrats and Republicans, and thus the models used by the pollsters are overemphasizing the Democrat vote and underestimating the Republican - we’ll see in a week....

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