Today’s entry: Do you think it’s odd that most general election polls look worse for Trump than the battleground polling? Are there any pollsters you trust?
Bottom Line: I’ll start with the question most that easier answered. I trust any pollster who gets sampling right. It’s the getting it right that’s the devil in the details. The single biggest issue with polling in this cycle has been the same as it was four years ago. Generally poor sampling. According to Gallup’s monthly party ID tracking, 1% more people ID as Democrats than Republicans. In Florida, based on voter registration, we know that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.3%. What this illustrates, is that any national sampling which samples greater than 1% more Democrats than Republicans isn’t a sound sample, and generously, no more than 2% more Democrats in Florida. So what do samples most recently look like?
Some pollsters don’t even disclose sampling, which instantly ensures a lack of credibility and many more bury it within their reporting. Let’s start with the NBC News/WSJ polling released Sunday demonstrating Biden with a 14-point lead. The first issue with this poll is that they sampled registered voters as opposed to likely voters. That instantly presents a potential point of failure in these results. At this stage of the cycle, only likely voter samples should be used because it accounts for voter enthusiasm which sampling registered voters does not. Second, the sample itself. Buried on the 12th page of the survey was the ID of those sampled. The sample was 45% Democrats compared to 36% Republicans. So here we have a poll which surveyed registered voters when it should have been likely, and they oversampled Democrats by 8% over national party identification. Still worse, the single largest block of individuals they spoke to were “Strong Democrats”. Hilariously this clearly flawed poll was assigned a 3.5% margin of error. You could quite literally double that margin and it still wouldn’t do the trick.
It’s more important that you don’t get hung up on a pollster, though there are some who are more responsible consistently than others, and instead read through methodology if you’re inclined. Accounting for samples compared to the current composition of voters is hard, that’s why I do what I do with my election-related series.
Now, regarding swing state polling vs. general election polling. What you’re describing is different than four years ago. In 2016, Donald Trump polled an average of 4.4% behind Hillary Clinton in swing states on this date compared to 3.7% nationally. As we know that’s the inverse of what played out with Trump winning most swing states and Hillary Clinton winning the national popular vote. There’s a very interesting dynamic playing out right now. President Trump is polling several percentage points behind where he was nationally at this time four years ago, in part driven by the absurdity of polls like the NBC/WSJ cited earlier, however, he’s actually polling around 1% better in swing states than four years ago. President Trump appears to be slightly outperforming his 2016 path.
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