"The Party of Unity and Empathy"

“President Trump is the most pro-gay President in American history.”

Funny Numbers

The honesty of CNN?

CNN created a bit of a stir this week with the release of their most recent Presidential preference poll. It showed a "tightening race" with Biden leading Trump by only four points 50-46.

Although Rasmussen had shown the race this tight for awhile now, none of the other polls had shown the race this tight. What made CNN's poll even more shocking, other than their typical animus to Trump, was that in their last poll, back in June, they had shown Biden leading Trump by fourteen points, 55-41. Quite a change.

But as most people have come to recognize, polls are as much to influence public opinion as they are to gauge it, at least in the early stages of an election. I have always known that polls are totally dependent on the demographics of those polled, in fact the ways in which polls can be manipulated are almost limitless; age, gender, party, location, race can be manipulated to "steer" a poll to a desired outcome. One hundred white Republican women in the suburbs of the Northeast United States are not going to vote, or poll, the same as one hundred white Republican women in the rural Midwest, though they are all Republican white women.

The most common and widely known manipulation of polls is party affiliation. Putting aside my white Republican women scenario, simply oversampling a particular party demographic is an easy way to sway a poll. Let's begin by looking at something based in objectivity and reality rather than slight of hand.

Above is the PEW Research analysis of the 2016 Presidential election partisan turn out. Below it is the current Gallup Party Affiliation Poll taken between July 30 and August 12. The last row is the average of those two polls. Now lets look at who CNN polled in their last two polls and compare them to these numbers.

You will notice that in the most recent poll, though the overall percentage of partisan makeup is different, the difference between the two parties is the same as the 2016 turn out Democrats plus 4% and only 1% different from the current Gallup party affiliation poll of Democrats plus 5%. Back in August the difference of who CNN polled was 7% or 3% more Democrats than the PEW 2016 analysis and 2% higher than the current Gallup poll numbers.

Because CNN polled closer to the 2016 actual turn out model in August, it drastically reduced Biden's lead. The race didn't really "tighten" so much as CNN used more realistic polling metrics. Want to see what happens when you apply this to all the recent polls? OK here you go;

As you can see except for the new CNN poll the others have a quite high Democrat representation bias in their polls. Anyone surprised? ABC actually seems to follow the current Gallup party polling numbers, but they don't seem to have enough percentages to equal 100%, they are missing a full 6% of people polled, strange that. I would also point out that the Gallup Party Affiliation is a poll that Gallup does of all Americans that they poll without any filtering. Just because more Americans identify as Democrats does not mean they vote. This means when it comes to election day they generally even up the numbers.

So that is fun with numbers for today, we shall see how much the race "tightens up" in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.