How One Young Black Man Supporting Trump Massively Skews The LA Times Presidential Poll

Let's jump right into this, because this post is going to be a bit on the wonky side. It's presidential silly season, as we have said before, and this iteration of it is particularly bad, like a dumpster fire that suddenly has a thousand gallons of gasoline dropped onto it from a crop-duster flown by a blind zombie. Which, of course, makes it quite fascinating to watch for those of us with an independent persuasion. Chiefly interesting for myself is watching how the polls shift and change with each landmark on this sad, sad journey. It makes poll aggregating groups, such as the excellent Project FiveThirtyEight, quite useful in getting a ten-thousand foot view as to how the public is reacting to the news of the day.

But sites like that obviously rely on individual polls in order to generate their aggregate outlooks, which makes understanding, at least at a high level, just how these political polls get their results interesting as well. And, if you watch these things like I do, you have probably been curious about one particular poll, the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, commonly shortened to the USC/LAT poll, which has consistently put out results on the Presidential race that differ significantly from other major polls. That difference has generally amounted to wider support for Donald Trump in the race, with specific differences in support for Trump among certain demographics. To the credit of those that run the poll, they have been exceptionally transparent about how they generate their numbers, which led the New York Times to dig in and try to figure out the reason for the skewed results. It seems an answer was found and it's gloriously absurd.

Ask yourself why the media is so worried about one poll ruining their average of bogus polls. Because when you look at Trump with 20,000 at his rallies each day, while Hillary can barely pull in 200 once a week it’s obvious Trump is winning big.

And so they are getting ready to steal it. The D+12 polls are a joke but they need to do it because they know 90% of Americans have no clue what samples are about and only hear the top line on the news. This way if they’re able to steal the election it’s not a big surprise. And if Trump wins they can blame it on the Russians.

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Over the last 8 weeks, the viewership on youtube for any of Trump’s rallies is around 30,000. So whatever attendance Trump gets add another 30,000 to the audience. This did not used to be this way, but viewers on Youtube have exploded.

To those who don’t want to read the whole post, they are saying that one black 19 year old male in Illinois is being counted many times through statistical weighing. What polls often do, for example, is add up the votes for one demographic category, then assign them as % value based on historic trends. So if blacks make up 12% of votes, they take the black poll respondents and assign them 12% weight to the poll. Same with many other demographic groups such as age, voting history etc. So, the NYT is saying that this one man is being counted in multiple demographics, such as a black voter, a young voter, a male voter, and a voter who did not vote in 2012 among others. Each of those categories gets assigned as a % of the total, and if the same person is put into multiple categories, he will give extra weight because they are extrapolating his one vote into the many different groups they count, in effect counting him many times. This would be especially problematic if, for example, they only polled 4% blacks, but then gave them 12% weighting. Each black poll responder would be counted 3 times, just in that one demographic, and many more times for whatever other demographics he falls into. And since he is a Trump supporter, the NYT claims he is the reason the USC/LAT poll shows a consistent Trump lead. They are counting him many, many times.

They did not explain how other polls correct for the same problem. And as posted above, the article itself has been challenged as misunderstanding the methodology. See the debunked posts for info on that.

Funny thing is, the NYT claims that this USC/LAT poll is an ‘outlier’ because the other major polls show a Hillary lead. As many know, a lot of the other polls have problems of their own, particularly that they are over sampling Democrats and/or under sampling independents. Since the MSM basically admits they are working for Hillary, you have to question their polls more intently than any of the independent polls.

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