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'Fraud': Mainstream polls use 29% more Democrats than Republicans

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dobieg

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And liberals wonder why we don't trust polls.


Most of the top political polls that got the 2016 presidential race dead wrong are continuing to use a flawed methodology in rating President Trump's approval ratings that favors Democrats, women and younger voters, according to a new analysis.

The report shows that the mainstream polls oversample an average of 29 percent more Democrats than Republicans and the results skew anti-Trump. The result is that it robs Trump of about 8 points in his approval ratings, from 46 percent to 38 percent, it said.
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'Fraud': Mainstream polls use 29% more Democrats than Republicans
 
It’ll be interesting to see a follow-up on this to see how accurate it is. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the US, but not by that much.
 
dobieg said:
And liberals wonder why we don't trust polls.




'Fraud': Mainstream polls use 29% more Democrats than Republicans
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Good pollsters don’t weight by party ID at all. It’s a dynamic metric that people change how they feel about frequently. For instance, many Trump supporters don’t characterize themselves as Republicans at all right now because of the attacks leveled at the leaders in congress like McConnell and Ryan. Yet these people will vote almost straight Republican.

If you actually did add more people who identify as Republican to the sample it is that which would be distorting the polling process.
 
eohrnberger said:
Anything to push their favored narrative, it would seem.
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Pollsters have no incentive to do that. Most of their polling is not public political polling. Being wrong publicly would send a sign they aren’t good to all of their potential private clients.
 
I wonder if the OP's writer knows how statistical sampling works.
 
Anagram said:
Pollsters have no incentive to do that. Most of their polling is not public political polling. Being wrong publicly would send a sign they aren’t good to all of their potential private clients.
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That makes sense, but then, how'd the pollsters get it wrong so badly in the weeks before the election last November?
I mean I have my idea why, but using the logic you've outlined above, how'd they blow it so badly? And why?
 
eohrnberger said:
That makes sense, but then, how'd the pollsters get it wrong so badly in the weeks before the election last November?
I mean I have my idea why, but using the logic you've outlined above, how'd they blow it so badly? And why?
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They didn’t. Look at the final polls for the national vote and the battleground states. They are nearly all spot on or very close.

On the other hand there was this media narrative that Hillary would easily win. That turned out not to be true, but it wasn’t really reflected in the final polls.
 
Anagram said:
They didn’t. Look at the final polls for the national vote and the battleground states. They are nearly all spot on or very close.

On the other hand there was this media narrative that Hillary would easily win. That turned out not to be true, but it wasn’t really reflected in the final polls.
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So the polls were accurate, but the reporting of the poll results followed the demanded political narrative.
The biased media can't even report facts truthfully. :roll:
 
eohrnberger said:
So the polls were accurate, but the reporting of the poll results followed the demanded political narrative.
The biased media can't even report facts truthfully. :roll:
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Or they were just distracted by national polls. There was way, way too much reporting on national tracking polls during the election even by conservative media. It was frustrating.

And then after the election there was for some reason heaps of praise thrown on the LA Times national poll that had Trump in the lead the whole time even though that was actually literally the most inaccurate national poll of all.
 
Anagram said:
Or they were just distracted by national polls. There was way, way too much reporting on national tracking polls during the election even by conservative media. It was frustrating.

And then after the election there was for some reason heaps of praise thrown on the LA Times national poll that had Trump in the lead the whole time even though that was actually literally the most inaccurate national poll of all.
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Oh man. What a crazy world we live in. The least accurate poll called the best just because of the outcome and not for actually being accurate. :roll:

It was frustrating, and somewhat disheartening, being an ABC (Anybody But Clinton) and having a constant stream of 'she's gonna win easily' pitched everyday. I'll agree with you there.
 
Mycroft said:
This isn't news to me. I've been pointing out this oversampling crap for over a year. This is especially a tactic used by Mainstream Media generated polls...including from Fox. I guess they are determined to influence their useful idiots. The ends justify any means.
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And for a year people have been pointing out that having more "democrats" in a poll versus "republicans" does not represent an "oversampling" unless those percentages are different than the population being sampled.

So what should the percentages of

Republicans
Democrats
Independents

be?
 
JasperL said:
And for a year people have been pointing out that having more "democrats" in a poll versus "republicans" does not represent an "oversampling" unless those percentages are different than the population being sampled.

So what should the percentages of

Republicans
Democrats
Independents

be?
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I usually refer to Gallup.

Party Affiliation | Gallup Historical Trends
 
eohrnberger said:
Oh man. What a crazy world we live in. The least accurate poll called the best just because of the outcome and not for actually being accurate. :roll:

It was frustrating, and somewhat disheartening, being an ABC (Anybody But Clinton) and having a constant stream of 'she's gonna win easily' pitched everyday. I'll agree with you there.
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Well yeah when you look at what the poll was supposed to be measuring, the national popular vote. Which Trump most certainly did not win but because he won the electoral college a poll that showed that he would win the popular vote was praised. You really don’t see the disconnect there?
 
eohrnberger said:
Oh man. What a crazy world we live in. The least accurate poll called the best just because of the outcome and not for actually being accurate. :roll:

It was frustrating, and somewhat disheartening, being an ABC (Anybody But Clinton) and having a constant stream of 'she's gonna win easily' pitched everyday. I'll agree with you there.
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The national polls were accurate. Hillary had 3 million or so more popular votes.

The interpretation of the national polls was stupid. She lost a few states by a little, but she needed them to win, and that was that. Really, all they should be saying based on national polls is the likely number of popular votes. But you obviously have to look to 50 sets of single-state polls to accurately predict a winner, especially in a campaign where one candidate just sort of ignores a number of important states.
 
eohrnberger said:
That makes sense, but then, how'd the pollsters get it wrong so badly in the weeks before the election last November?
I mean I have my idea why, but using the logic you've outlined above, how'd they blow it so badly? And why?
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Pew has a few reasons for the fail. I go with these 2...
But remember Trump won by 80,000 votes in 3 blue States that were heavily targeted by Russian trolls on social media. Those were the "shy Trumpers" I bet. Also Hillary won the popular vote quite handily so the polls were not that off.

One likely culprit is what pollsters refer to as nonresponse bias. This occurs when certain kinds of people systematically do not respond to surveys despite equal opportunity outreach to all parts of the electorate. We know that some groups – including the less educated voters who were a key demographic for Trump on Election Day – are consistently hard for pollsters to reach. It is possible that the frustration and anti-institutional feelings that drove the Trump campaign may also have aligned with an unwillingness to respond to polls. The result would be a strongly pro-Trump segment of the population that simply did not show up in the polls in proportion to their actual share of the population.

Some have also suggested that many of those who were polled simply were not honest about whom they intended to vote for. The idea of so-called “shy Trumpers” suggests that support for Trump was socially undesirable, and that his supporters were unwilling to admit their support to pollsters. This hypothesis is reminiscent of the supposed “Bradley effect,” when Democrat Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to Republican George Deukmejian despite having been ahead in the polls, supposedly because voters were reluctant to tell interviewers that they were not going to vote for a black candidate.
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Why 2016 election polls missed their mark | Pew Research Center
 
Crovax said:
What does it mean by “got the 2016 presidential race dead wrong”?

The polls showed Clinton winning the popular vote by 3.3 points, she won by 2.1 points well within the margin of error
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Yeah, how did those polls do in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pa.?
 
Mr Person said:
The national polls were accurate. Hillary had 3 million or so more popular votes.

The interpretation of the national polls was stupid. She lost a few states by a little, but she needed them to win, and that was that. Really, all they should be saying based on national polls is the likely number of popular votes. But you obviously have to look to 50 sets of single-state polls to accurately predict a winner, especially in a campaign where one candidate just sort of ignores a number of important states.
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True. It also doesn't help when a candidate alienates the very voters they need to swing over to their side, peter's out in the last weeks of the campaign, etc. etc. the list is pretty long.
 
iguanaman said:
Pew has a few reasons for the fail. I go with these 2...
But remember Trump won by 80,000 votes in 3 blue States that were heavily targeted by Russian trolls on social media. Those were the "shy Trumpers" I bet. Also Hillary won the popular vote quite handily so the polls were not that off.

Why 2016 election polls missed their mark | Pew Research Center
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Since anyone who supported Trump was labeled as deplorable, do you think those same people would be answering pollster's questions on the phone?

I think that labeling them as deplorables drove them underground, only to spring up later, unexpectedly.
 
eohrnberger said:
Since anyone who supported Trump was labeled as deplorable, do you think those same people would be answering pollster's questions on the phone?

I think that labeling them as deplorables drove them underground, only to spring up later, unexpectedly.
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That is not what Hillary said at all. Are you denying that the KKK and the Nazi party are filled with deplorables? But you are describing the "shy Trumpers" who quite likely were flipped by all the fake news from Russian trolls on social media. It only took a few % of
the millions of users that were targeted. Putin was quite adept at that targeting and one has to wonder how he did it.
 
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