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The disturbing inadequacies of polls that show Biden well ahead of President Trump should remind us of 2016

Jun 17, 2020

By Dave Andrusko

To borrow from the immortal Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again—except on an infinitely wider and more vicious scale. In 2016 all the best people knew Hillary Clinton was a lock to be our 45th (and first female) President. You may remember how that turned out.

Here’s the familiar cycle. President Trump’s poll numbers will go down—which is certainly plausible in the middle of a pandemic, an economic meltdown, and civil unrest—but in numbers that are simply unbelievable. President Trump tweeted about one on June 8th but the CNN survey was only one of many (albeit perhaps the worst). 

The President described the survey of registered voters which had him down 14 points to pro-abortion former vice president Joe Biden as an example of “suppression polls.” We’ll be back to the CNN survey in a moment and why that criticism is valid.

The aforementioned cycle will have obligatory “correctives,” in which someone will point out that “Trump has a point about the polls,” as Steven Shepard writes in POLITICO today. Of course, we will be told there is no deliberate malice—“Pollsters aren’t deliberately skewing their surveys against the president and his party as Trump’s orbit alleges”– a sentence which Shepard presumably typed with a straight face.

But before we’ll talk about how the CNN poll is deliberately unfair, let’s see where Shepard has a point about President Trump having a point.

* “But some pollsters, especially the relatively few who conduct surveys in battleground states, are still grappling with the same problems that plagued those polls four years ago. In fact, most pollsters believe that, on balance, state polls are overstating the scale of Biden’s advantage.

“That was precisely the problem in 2016: The national polls were largely accurate, to within the margin of error. But there were too few state polls, and many of those that were conducted failed to collect accurate data, especially from white voters without college degrees in key swing states.

“And those issues haven’t been fixed.”

In a word, the state surveys (again) are not catching those without college degrees in sufficient numbers (see why below) while “voters with greater educational attainment are more likely to complete surveys — and more likely to vote for Democratic candidates.”

But the margins are so great this alone wouldn’t explain the supposed large Biden advantage. What else is flawed?

* “Not enough surveys are being conducted in the battleground states, and those that exist are failing to account for a key political dynamic of modern politics, especially in the Trump era: the rapid movement of lower-income white voters to Republicans and upscale whites to Democrats.” “Not enough” is putting it mildly.

*Although hugely important, there is an almost throwaway line about the famous “shy” Trump voter. He or she either does not want to be identified for fear of harassment or simply does not trust pollsters AT ALL. 

Shepard then turns to the CNN poll showing Biden ahead 55-41 among registered voters. He believes they did a bang up job, although Shepard writes (without offering specifics) “The bigger problem appears to be in state polls, as evidenced by CNN’s own polling standards. The network’s polling standards state it won’t report on election surveys that ‘do not ensure that respondents of all education levels are adequately reflected.’”

Shepard concludes

At last week’s annual AAPOR convention — held online because of the coronavirus pandemic — Nate Cohn, the New York Times data journalist who has worked with Siena College on their multi-million dollar polling partnership, observed that the state polls leaned way too far toward Democrats in 2014 and 2016. In 2018, he said, the polls were more accurate but still showed a Democratic slant, especially “in a number of white, working-class states,” like Indiana and Ohio. …

“So far in 2020, it sure seems like Joe Biden is faring particularly well in the states where the polls were most biased toward Hillary Clinton four years ago,” Cohn told the virtual attendees.

So, the gist of the story is that the state polls could be, and probably are, lacking, but are not “skewed,” as McLaughlin & Associates, one of President Trump’s pollsters, said of the CNN poll. Indeed Shepard assures us, “CNN stood by their poll, which generally follows best practices and does weight by education.”

Where does McLaughlin & Associates disagree? First and foremost “The latest skewed media polls must be intentional,” they argue. News operations “are consistently under-polling Republicans and therefore, reporting biased polls.”

*The major polls “continue to poll adults or registered voters that skew away from likely voters” (the latter is far more predictive of actual voting behavior). “So instead of the 33% Republican turnout which actually happened in 2020, they are reporting polls on only 26%, 25%, or even 24% Republicans.” (My emphasis.)

For perspective, Stacey Lennox reminds us, “The latest Gallup poll shows 28% of respondents identify as Republicans and 31% identify as Democrats. This is a three-point swing, not a seven-point swing” which is the self-identification gap the CNN poll found in its survey.

But in their haste to bury Trump—to create a narrative of a “Biden electoral lock”—they miss a huge component [besides the Trump campaign’s extraordinary “digital prowess and collection methods”], which CNN’s own poll has buried in the final two paragraphs.

After quoting the results of massive Trump rallies that took place prior to the pandemic, Lennox tells us

In a recent [CNN] poll, 70% of President Trump’s voters indicated they are voting for him as opposed to voting against Joe Biden. This contrasts with Joe Biden only having 38% percent of his voters saying they are voting for him. Of Biden’s voters, 60% say they are voting against Trump. Ask Mitt Romney how that worked out

As Lennox noted in a prior story

You can see the same trend in every race where that pattern exists. If a significant share of voters were not voting for a candidate but rather against his or her opponent, that candidate invariably loses all the way back to Reagan vs. Mondale. The only candidate who had a larger share of people indicating they were voting for him or her rather than against his or her opponent than President Trump was Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Stay tuned. While the “Mainstream Media” will offer occasional correctives (i.e., the truth), NRL News Today will do so constantly.

Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org and/or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daveha. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

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