Reading further into Kuo’s 5/14/2024 article, regarding the recent NYT/Siena poll data set:
There’s another problem with the sample set: It’s heavily biased toward conservatives. In fact, a full 80 percent of its respondents described themselves as something other than liberal, with nearly twice as many conservatives answering:
ANSWERS [ALL STATES]:
- Very liberal: 10%
- Somewhat liberal: 10%
- Moderate: 39%
- Somewhat conservative: 19%
- Very conservative: 17%
- Don’t know/Refused: 5%
Was this oversample of conservatives on purpose? Any mention of why there’s a conservative lean by the Times? Nope.
EDIT: Still more.
Election observers poring over the details of the polls were quick to point out some rather ridiculous conclusions. I should first note that every poll has some amount of bad data in it, and we shouldn’t ever draw broad conclusions from small sample sets. But when a poll is riddled with data that defies reality and all probability, we need to at least take note.
Take Pennsylvania. The NYT poll has Biden winning Philadelphia by 54-30, which is a big drop from how he did in 2020, when he won 81.4 percent of the vote there. That means either that there is a massive collapse in Black voter support for Biden in just four years, or that the poll is not picking up the right data. And in the suburbs, the NYT poll shows a suburban shift to the right since 2020, despite trending to the left in every election since then, including just a few months ago.
We can also look at Nevada. The NYT poll has Biden actually losing Clark County, a Democratic stronghold, by eight points. As Democratic consultant Tim Hogan noted, “That is not going to happen. Insane that outlier numbers are driving so much coverage.” Reporter Jon Ralston, who crunches Nevada numbers for a living and is my go-to guy on this, remarked that something is amiss in these Nevada numbers. He tweeted,
I hesitate to post more on NYT/Siena poll, but regionals are bizarre:
Trump up 8 in Dem bastion of Clark where Biden beat him by 9 in 2020. 17-pt swing!
In Washoe, where Biden won by 4, Trump is up 14! 18 pts!
There’s somethin’ happenin’ here…
The only poll that counts…