- 13 Oct 2019 01:46
#15041562
Some guys on the internet have recently been arguing that Fox New's impeachment poll oversampled Democrats by almost 20%, without which support for impeachment would be basically unchanged from before the Ukraine thing started up.
This got me thinking about the polls in general. How is it that Trump's average approval rating (which includes many left-leaning polls) continues to be higher than Obama's was at this point in his Presidency, yet he consistently loses to random Democrats in a head-to-head matchup?
Fortunately, it appears that Fox News publishes all of their polling data online at Scribd. So anyone can go and read it. As it turns out, they are also oversampling Democrats in their Presidential head-to-head matchups by about 10% (edit: I did some double-checking and originally I had this at 20%).
When adjusted for this, it suggests that Trump could be approaching 50% of the vote. To put it very briefly, recently Elizabeth Warren was polled as getting like 51% of the vote (which doesn't pass the smell test) to Trump's 44%. But Democrats were oversampled by 8%. If you keep it simple and subtract 8% from 51%, you get 43% of the vote. It is not really that simple though because as the Republican and Independent ratio of votes increase, with Trump having an over 90% approval rating within the Republican Party, his voting numbers would go up as the Democrat's numbers go down. Furthermore, Republicans enjoy an electoral college advantage which can give them a 1% or more increase to relative vote counts. Finally, the usual registered vs. likely voter difference further inflates Republican votes beyond whatever a registered voter poll suggests. With these things in mind, Trump would cruise comfortably into re-election.
One way to read this information is that Fox News is leading us along towards another shocking ratings bonanza. Literally every Democrat polls above Trump because they're getting a 10% or more bump at the sampling level, meanwhile, most of those candidates don't seem like they're even trying to win a general election.
Although it's easy to point these things out, I feel that it's irresponsible to give people a false impression of reality, which is what the entire news media seems content to do these days, albeit for slightly different reasons.
Edit: I tweaked the numbers a bit.
This got me thinking about the polls in general. How is it that Trump's average approval rating (which includes many left-leaning polls) continues to be higher than Obama's was at this point in his Presidency, yet he consistently loses to random Democrats in a head-to-head matchup?
Fortunately, it appears that Fox News publishes all of their polling data online at Scribd. So anyone can go and read it. As it turns out, they are also oversampling Democrats in their Presidential head-to-head matchups by about 10% (edit: I did some double-checking and originally I had this at 20%).
When adjusted for this, it suggests that Trump could be approaching 50% of the vote. To put it very briefly, recently Elizabeth Warren was polled as getting like 51% of the vote (which doesn't pass the smell test) to Trump's 44%. But Democrats were oversampled by 8%. If you keep it simple and subtract 8% from 51%, you get 43% of the vote. It is not really that simple though because as the Republican and Independent ratio of votes increase, with Trump having an over 90% approval rating within the Republican Party, his voting numbers would go up as the Democrat's numbers go down. Furthermore, Republicans enjoy an electoral college advantage which can give them a 1% or more increase to relative vote counts. Finally, the usual registered vs. likely voter difference further inflates Republican votes beyond whatever a registered voter poll suggests. With these things in mind, Trump would cruise comfortably into re-election.
One way to read this information is that Fox News is leading us along towards another shocking ratings bonanza. Literally every Democrat polls above Trump because they're getting a 10% or more bump at the sampling level, meanwhile, most of those candidates don't seem like they're even trying to win a general election.
Although it's easy to point these things out, I feel that it's irresponsible to give people a false impression of reality, which is what the entire news media seems content to do these days, albeit for slightly different reasons.
Edit: I tweaked the numbers a bit.
Last edited by Hong Wu on 13 Oct 2019 02:04, edited 2 times in total.
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) are neutered idiots, but the former are the only ones I'm concerned about murdering people for their twitter-mania.
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