Posted on 08/19/2016 5:48:47 AM PDT by xzins
Democrat-heavy sample nets better news for Trump
Among the same Democrat-heavy sample: 26% say they voted for Romney in 2012. 42% say they are leaning toward Trump in 2016.
The following is a media news analysis
Another poll; another way to spin.
Earlier this week, I showed how the reporting on a Bloomberg poll could be skewed to make results look more or less positive for a given candidate.
Today, we look at a Washington Post/ABC News poll that also purports to show a widening Clinton lead over Trump – by 8 points: 50% to 42%. This may well be the case. However, looking at the poll sample numbers, there’s some relevant context not reported in news stories.
Read the Washington Post/ABC News poll
The poll interviewed 10% more people who identify as Democrats (33%) than Republicans (23%), with the largest group (36%) calling themselves independent. So with 10% more Democrats than Republicans questioned, Clinton leads Trump by 8-points.
Even more interesting, the same Democrat-heavy sample favored Obama by a larger 10-point margin over Romney in 2012: 36% Obama to 26% Romney (with 32% saying they didn’t vote). We know this because the poll asked respondents how they voted in 2012. So today, Trump is outperforming Romney with the exact same Democrat-heavy sample of voters.
In other words, the same Democrat-heavy sample of Americans that gave Obama a 10-point edge in 2012, gives Clinton a slightly smaller lead, 8-points, in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll.
Further, this particular sample has not proven to be representative in the past. Of those who said they voted in 2012, they gave Obama a hefty 15-point edge over Romney: 54% to 39%. But the actual general election was a much tighter 4-point race: 51% Obama, 47% Romney. So Romney ended up performing 8-points better and Obama 3-points worse than this Democrat-heavy sample group reflected.
Among the same Democrat-heavy sample: 26% say they voted for Romney in 2012, 42% say they are leaning toward Trump in 2016.
Hillary Clinton
One polling expert told me there’s typically no disclosure or adjustment made when random sampling turns up significantly more respondents identifying with one party over another. There’s no way to know how that will match up with the population that actually turns out to vote. “It’s a judgement call,” says the expert. Finding substantially more respondents identifying with one party over another could be an indication that the makeup of the electorate is changing, she adds.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll does what the Bloomberg poll did in pressing respondents to pick a candidate even if they initially stated they didn’t know if they were going to vote or who they would vote for. [Bloomberg added in the “leaners” when reporting the totals in an article, even though the respondents were answering a different question than “for whom would you vote.” This gave Clinton the appearance of a slightly larger lead than she actually had in the Bloomberg poll.] The Washington Post/ABC News poll seems to take this a step further: they represent the two questions “for whom would you vote” and for whom would you “lean” as if they were a single question, though they were undoubtedly asked as two separate questions. See question #2. For some reason, they chose not to separately publish both answers, and only provided the combined total. Does that favor Clinton, as in the Bloomberg poll, whereas without the ” leaners,” Trump is closer? A query to the Washington Post polling department was not answered by publication time.
There’s another point worth noting. The pollsters asked a series of four questions raising negatives about Trump: “goes too far in criticizing,” “a problem with respect for for people with whom he disagrees,” “criticism of Muslim-American family whose son was killed while a U.S. Army captain in Iraq,” “biased against women and minorities.” But they asked just one question raising a negative about Clinton: “too willing to break the rules.” One could envision other questions more comparable to the Trump questions such as: “considers herself above the law in light of the FBI findings about her email servers,” “committed perjury giving incorrect testimony to Congress,” “demonstrates hypocrisy on women’s rights considering her husband’s background and her response to it,” and “jeopardized national security with conduct the FBI called extremely careless.” But these questions weren’t asked. This means there are a number of potential negative Trump points to highlight when reporting on the poll, but fewer potential negative Clinton points available.
None of this is to suggest the headline of this poll won’t prove to be entirely accurate in the general election. Poll trends over time are typically fairly accurate predictors. But this poll is most likely to be an accurate predictor, it seems, in a race where 10% more Democrats vote than Republicans… and that remains to be seen.
I’ve been looking at another polling manipulation... In the several polls that provided enough methodology on this, they are way oversampling college educated people. You can look at the census.gov site to find educational attainment nationally or by state, and see that the college educated proportion (including ‘some college)’ is 10-20 points lower than that in any given poll. I know they are choosing likely voters, yet I find it hard to believe that the non-college educated just don’t vote. That factor would be a sneaky (and easy) line item for the weighting algorithm to use to filter out those they believe are already less likely to for for Hillary...
The Donald’s internal polls are where the truth lies.
Actually, the electoral college steals the election from republicans as states are winner take all instead of proportionate.
Can a person find college education stats for each individual state?
In the Georgia poll that says Georgia is tied, they have 24%+ of blacks with an advanced degree. It shows whites with 22% have advanced degrees.
Is that possible?
That’s exactly what they are doing. Warping the polls to do this.
But...
BREXIT!
It also may have the reverse effect. The unmotivated, lazy Hillary voters will just stay home election day thinking they got it in the bag.
However, I believe computer voting machines are illegal in Great Britain.
By slightly altering the ideological mix of those polled (Democrats, Republicans, Independents), the results can vary dramatically. For instance, if you sample 35D/35R/30I, you come up with a much different result than with a sampling like 38D/34R/28I. That slight change in the mix can turn a Trump lead into a Trump deficit.
I believe polling has an undeserved reputation for accuracy because they almost always mirror the actual results of the election give or take a few points. However, this is sleight of hand. By putting out false polls well ahead of the election, they tend to discourage supporters of the "losing" candidate and to an extent, the polls become self-fulfilling because the "winner" has already been established.
Sometimes however, the real support for the "losing" candidate is so large that the pollsters have to correct for that as the election draws nearer. This is why we saw Reagan "surge" at the end of the 1980 election while all summer long he was well behind Carter (just one example of many).
In my opinion, Reagan didn't "surge" at the end. He was probably way ahead of Carter all along. But the liberal media tried desperately to establish the narrative that Reagan was just not going to beat Carter. They were probably successful in getting many people to switch to Carter (or John Anderson who also was running that year as an Independent). But it clearly wasn't enough and the pollsters ensured that their reputations were preserved by making corrections at the end of the cycle and selling it as a "Reagan surge."
In one of the PA polls that I looked at, they had 78% of the respondents as college educated, while the census shows 40% as such!
There is no requirements that the state’s electors be winner take all. That is left up to each state.
1. Polls are widely used as fluff and filler. They talk about what your opinion is about the news, rather than write news.
2. Polls are used to manipulate your views, convincing you that you are on the losing side of an issue in hopes you’ll figure its hopeless, why bother to vote. Or even push the weak-minded to move to what they are told is the winning side. It doesn’t work so well on conservatives who are told their whole lives they are on the losing side... but it works with a lot of people.
3. Polls are a feedback mechanism for propagandists to help them to properly focus their work. By propagandists, I refer to your average rank and file “journ-o-list”.
4. Polls provide cover when you intend to steal an election. If people have been told repeatedly that so-and-so will lose, when he loses they won’t question it. And if they do, the journ-o-lists will use the fake polls to hammer them.
We’ve seen increasingly over the years more and more evidence of vote fraud, increasing numbers of precincts with more votes than voters, and we have seen that hacking electronic machines is child’s play. So the latter point worries me. GOP never pushes back on vote fraud, never, not even when they actually like their own candidate. In a year in which they oppose the GOP candidate, you can be sure there will be no push back for vote fraud.
If they ever go by popular votes GOP will never win President again. All Dems will do is go to NY, Chicago. Miami, California and etc. The fly over country will never see a campaigning person. Dems want this big time. Think about it folks popular votes is not good for real America.
My guess is that more college educated are thoroughly indoctrinated than are not.
There needs to be a major landslide for Trump. If he just barley wins you will see bipartisan opposition to every policy he puts forth from the Democratics and GOPe members of congress. After which you will see the MSM condemning him for being unwilling to work with congress on “common sense matters”.
absolutely true. We would never have had a nation if big states weren’t forced to compromise with small states! W’ere a federal union of 50 states! Without the electoral college we would have had wackjob Gore for 8 years!
Opinion Savvy Fox Georgia polls has lots of screwy internals.
Attikisson is saying without saying it directly that this is a ‘lying poll’ that is being used as political manipulation.
POTUS polling is useless, because it likely changes few minds in terms of voting; it’s a pretty unusual voter who says in November ‘I’m going with the guy that’s polling better’...
it gives political pundits something to yammer about, and thus justify their paychecks; plus, this far out, nobody cares...come back in October, and we’ll see what’s what...
Obama’s not quite 4% margin yielded a 332-206 margin last time around, for those that think voter margins are important; a point or so lower for Trump would yield 347-190, while a 3% deficit likely ends up 290-248, dramatizing the sizeable shift in the EC due to miniscule vote changes...
Soros Diebold machines are not to be trusted. Demand proof of integrity, and short of that being satisfactory, demand a paper trail.
I prefer the punch cards to anything computerized.
Paper ballot is the best by far, imho.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.