Monday, June 15, 2020

Survey SAYS...

Biden ahead by 14 among registered voters; Trump approval below 40% [More]
From the same date in 2016:


And remember, there's a difference between polls of "registered voters" and polls of  "high propensity voters." I'm wondering why I'm not seeing headlines about those.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are at least three other issues that obscured the trends from the pollsters in 2016 and as far as I can tell are still in effect.

1. More and more people are dropping their wireline phone in favor of wireless. Robo dialed calls are still legal for the first, but are against the law for the second making it more difficult for pollsters to reach those who only have a wireless phone.

2. Those who still have a wireline phone often have enhanced caller ID and won't pick up anything identified as "toll free caller", "unavailable", or the like.

3. Some who have a particularly perverse sense of humor (such as myself) will pick up the phone and lie through their teeth when answering the pollsters questions as a form of quiet revenge for being bombarded with tens of calls per day.

And that's before we even discuss "The Bradley Effect."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect

Dad29 said...

Another important difference is this: "National" polls mean nothing at all; only State polls are significant, so long as there is an Electoral College.

Henry said...

A Canadian polling firm?
Never mind that, what do the Red Chinese polls say?

DDS said...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/17/trump-polls-biden-324210

'GOP pollster Glen Bolger said he believes a combination of pollsters’ inability to get the right educational mix and to convince potential Trump voters to respond and answer truthfully to phone polls is pointing their surveys in a slight Democratic direction.

“I don’t know how big the effect is. I also don’t know what the ratio is between it being ‘shy Trump’ voters and interviewing too many college graduates and not enough non-college grads,” Bolger said. “But I do think those are factors in some of the polls that show a particularly wide lead for Biden at this point in time. And I do think that things will be closer in the states that the polls indicate right now.” '