One of my greatest frustrations in life is misinformation or half-given information without context. For example, the fact that Democrat operatives were the ones who created the fraudulent Trump-Russia collusion narrative, or that none of the alleged “crimes” President Trump was impeached for occurred. There’s something else that’s captured many who are nervously tracking the impeachment trial wondering where the dust will settle. The latest Fox News poll shows a margin of 50% to 43% Americans want Trump removed from office by the Senate. Those on the right have a tendency to assign credibility to the poll out of an inclination to trust Fox News polling more than others. Those on the left tend to hype these polls saying, 'see even Fox News polls say he should go!' What isn’t discussed is the premise of the polling.
First, Fox News like all other news organizations isn’t actually doing the polling. They’re paying for it to be conducted. Two third parties, one Democrat polling firm, and one Republican conducted the polling. The sampling is what matters most and I haven’t heard any discussion on it. There are three forms of samples polling firms will use. The least reliable for the purpose of gauging the public sentiment of those informed and engaged politically, adult only samples. Then there’s the most predictive of informed and engaged sentiment, likely voters. Lastly, there's one in-between, that's polling done of registered voters. The Fox News polling was conducted of registered voters. Already that tells you it’s just middle of the road in terms of eliciting sentiment of informed and engaged voters. Then there’s the political sampling.
The polling was conducted of 48% Democrats, 42% Republicans with independents and third-party identifiers rounding out the remaining ten percent. How does that compare with reality? In Gallup’s monthly polling of political affiliation,46% of Americans ID as Democrats compared to 45% who ID as Republicans right now. That means credible sampling would oversample Democrats by 1%. Instead, the pollsters used by Fox News oversampled Democrats by 2% and undersampled Republicans by 4% for a total misrepresentation of 6% in favor of Democrats. Not exactly the most credible sampling. So, let’s put this all together.
We have mediocre sampling that favored Democrats by 6% over an accurate representation of the country. Using the same people polled by the pollsters, but adjusting accurately for sampling, the same poll would have reflected a 48% to 48% stalemate on the issue. If the premise of anything is false, anything built on it will be too. Including this much-discussed Fox News impeachment poll.
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