2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumQuinnipiac’s Latino Problem: Shoddy Q Poll Strikes Again and Media Lap it Up (GD 16)
On June 29, we took apart a Q poll that showed Donald ahead of Hillary nationally by two points.
My colleagues Anthony Reed (predictive modeling expert and founder of the highly respected Benchmark Politics) and Eric Kleefeld pointed out that Quinnipiac was alone in its depiction of the race as particularly close. Most other polls at the time indicated a Hillary lead of between 4 and 6 points, and some polls placed her advantage at 8 points or above. Unsurprisingly, the Q poll got a wave of breathless media coverage. But a unique poll result is typically an indication of a bad poll result.
Heres Quinnipiacs fundamental problem: They tend to under-represent minorities. In their June 29 analysis, Reed and Kleefeld argued that polls like PPP, IBD/TIPP predict white turnout will be around 70 percent in 2016, down from 72 percent in the 2012 exit poll. Quinnipiac, on the other hand, has white turnout pegged at 73%. Another dubious finding in the June 29 Q poll is Latino support for Donald at 33% when most polls place it around 20%.
Quinnipiacs reputation was already very shaky, in light of their dishonest, discredited, and widely disseminated 2015 poll announcing that in a word-association exercise, voters immediately thought of Hillary as a liar.
While Quinnipiac presented the poll as evidence that voters associated liar with Hillary, we demonstrated that it was Republican and Republican-leaning respondents to the Q-poll who linked Hillary to liar and other derogatory terms (including bitch). It is a vastly different thing for Republicans, parroting Fox news and talk radio, to hurl misogynistic insults at Hillary than for all voters to believe Hillary is a liar.
As Mediaite explained at the time: As far as we know, only 35% of the people asked had something negative to say about Hillary Clinton. But the way Quinnipiac and the media played it, Hillary was seen as a liar by the majority of American voters.
More in link: http://bluenationreview.com/shoddy-q-poll-strikes-again-and-media-lap-it-up/
Lord Magus
(1,999 posts)Why would they care about accuracy when they can instead make the race look competitive?
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)an electorate somewhat more Republican-friendly than exit polls do--meaning Democrats probably do a little better in terms of % in some groups than exit polls indicate.
CrowCityDem
(2,348 posts)They make ridiculous assumptions about the demographics, and even give him the lead among Hispanics in Florida. Ha!
And with all that, they still only get him to losing the Electoral College by a small amount, instead of a landslide.
Cicada
(4,533 posts)Google upshot exit poll. Upshot makes the case that exit polls undercount whites by at least two percent. So maybe quinnipiac assumptions on the race composition of voters are accurate. But upshot also finds whites were more likely to vote for obama than exit polls indicated.
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)And the GOP and media knows it. Dressing . . . that's all it is.
Mc Mike
(9,116 posts)Her Sister
(6,444 posts)LenaBaby61
(6,979 posts)They're "ASSUMING" party identity again, and of course over-sampling whites by an even larger margin this time as you pointed out OP and under-sampling the minority vote by even larger margins as well this time around.
Cross tabs in Florida:
https://www.qu.edu/images/poll...
Cross tabs in Ohio:
https://www.qu.edu/images/poll...
Cross tabs in Pennsylvania:
https://www.qu.edu/images/poll...
Now, this is not to say that there won't be ebbs and flows in polling until November because there will be. This is not to say that we as Dems don't need to GOTV effort and work hard all across this country like we're down 10 points in EVERY state.
However, when you see a once Gold-Standard pollster like Q-Poll who is now trying to make "news" via their BIASED polling, and whose trended to being wrong the past few elections cycles than not well, you know, &
book_worm
(15,951 posts)and I don't think so. I think it will be at least as strong and that Latino turnout will be particularly high.
MFM008
(19,836 posts)In Latinos
Black community
Women of all colors
To really make a difference and put us
Over the top in Nov.
I'll be doing my part for the dull, white , over 55
College educated females however.