Merrill
May 25
Intentionally false polling has become a scourge of modern politics. Why the NYTs has joined the competition remains a mystery.
The remainder of the piece, hidden for length
There is one person who has caused Joe Biden more headaches than any of his Republican enemies. That person is the New York Times charlatan polling “guru”, Nate Cohn.
Cohn is responsible for the design and results of the monthly Times/Sienna presidential preference poll.
We should ignore the Times’ polls and any journalist or news reporter comments about Biden’s popularity based on these polls.
As a quantitative research tool, presidential political polls should be predictive of future elections results. However, like all quantitative consumer research, political polling requires a participant group reflective of the actual voting population and rejects any participants not likely to vote.
However, the Times/Sienna polls does the opposite. So as not to be accused of “liberal bias” the Times purposely includes an overly high proportion of low propensity, disengaged voters in its polling groups. Regardless of party affiliation, these “voters” tend to be unknowledgeable about issues and lean MAGA conservative. Cohn clearly admits his results are suspect in his latest NYTs article about the vagaries of political polling.
Because the Times is considered the authority of record for journalists and news reporters across all media, the Times has a greater responsibility to avoid biased polling. Unfortunately, the Times/Sienna results have undermined Biden’s support for months and has been the primary data source driving efforts to get one of America’s greatest presidents, not to run in Nov. resulting in serious damage to our democracy.
Thousands of lifetime subscribers to the Times have cancelled in disgust in the past 6 months. The Times’ leadership pretends the paper is just being “objective” when in fact it’s reporting is based on knowingly false data.
As Americans, we will keep pushing the Times to stop supporting Trump and correct its biased polling results. More than the 81 million Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 will be back in Nov. to give him the largest vote total in history.
Consider that if we do convince Americans to distrust the mainstream media, most of them (obviously with exceptions, as seen in this thread) will move rightward. Here’s a subtle article explaining how it works:
P.S. My link does have some “polling is broken” content, and I have been resisting that meme. I’d interpret my link to be saying that that there really is a tendency for Trump supporters to disproportionately hang up on pollsters, but they are the ones least likely to vote. This balances out some polling inaccuracy and fits within historical norms where polls are typically two or three percent off without being particularly broken.
I believe that the commenter, Merrill – as opposed to proposing that others should mistrust the entire mainstream media – was instead picking a bone with the NYT’s Nate Cohn and the specific NYT/Siena polls (which have sampling problems as detailed upthread).
Your linked article was an interesting read, especially regarding the “low trust” segment of the populace. I do take issue with the author using current polling numbers as the foundations of their arguments, however.
That said … there does now seem to be some slipping of Biden’s support among young adults and persons of color (though your link seems to admit this is driven by non-likely voter responses). Even the plus-Biden Marist poll Tero just posted talks about this effect. Not prepared to say that Biden’s actually underwater with young voters and BIPOC voters, but I can accept that he’s lost some percentage. How big a percentage – and whether it’s a meaningful amount – I don’t think will be discernable until November.
Perhaps. It does seem like Nate Cohn has been sensitive to the criticisms of the NYT/Siena polling, however – from last Friday 5/24 (paywalled link):
The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.
Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.
President Biden has actually led the last three New York Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Trump’s gains came from these less engaged voters.
On Friday the NYT’s Nate Cohn wrote about something core to our understanding of the 2024 election - Biden performs much better with likely voter universes than with registered voters. This is a good thing for us, as these likely voter universes are closer to the electorate which will actually show up this fall, and suggests that Trump’s leads in polls of registered voters may be phantom leads, as they include many voters who are unlikely to vote. It is also an explanation for why we’ve been winning elections across the US since Dobbs - when people actually go vote, we overperform polling and expectations and Republicans struggle.
The race is still pretty close. It’s close enough that [Biden] would have a very serious chance to win if the election were held tomorrow. And of course, the race won’t be held tomorrow: There are five-plus months to go for a possible Biden comeback (emphasis mine - b).
Together, there’s a case for taking a glass-almost-half-full perspective on Mr. Biden’s chances. Right or wrong, it’s a case that maybe hasn’t gotten quite as much attention as it deserves.
How is the race close? Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
If Mr. Biden won those battleground states, he’d probably be re-elected as president. They would combine to give him exactly 270 electoral college votes provided he held everywhere he won by six percentage points or more in 2020. That means he could lose all of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and so on, and still win.
(Rosenberg’s words resume here - b)
I believe we are favored to win MI, PA, WI and NE-2 and thus favored to win the election. We have popular and successful Democratic governors in all three states who are bringing enormous political muscle to the campaign (there are Dem govs in AZ, MI, NC, PA, WI). We have had strong electoral performances in all three states in recent years. Our Senate candidates lead in all three states, and Rs are having “bad candidate” problems again. Labor is making unprecedented investments in all three states, fighting for the most pro-Labor President in generations. The economies in all three states are strong, and majorities believe their economies have gotten better in the last two years, which gives us an awful lot to work with.
As of the reading of Trump’s guilty verdict yesterday, Trump and Biden are statistically tied in the RealClear Polling average of nine May 2024 polls - 47.6 to 46.7 percent, respectively. This post memorializes the current state of the RCP polling average so that it will be easier to later evaluate any polling effects resulting from Trump’s conviction.
Interestingly, NONE of the nine polls are likely-voter polls (frequently, RCP does use likely-voter polls in their average). To me, that fluffs Trump’s percentage up a few percent – but the difference would probably still be within the margin of error.
72 hours later: Trump 46.3, Biden 45.8. All ten polls in the RCP average today are registered voter polls (reminder: Trump’s numbers decline in likely voter polls).
Four of the ten polls caught at least some respondents after Trump’s conviction was announced.
Jay Kuo | 20 hrs ago
One big problem were the polls that were paid for and promoted by Republicans. They showed that Mandela Barnes stood no chance of winning, so money dried up. The polls were wrong, though, and he came within one point. If the polls hadn’t been skewed, he probably would have defeated Johnson.
Ander Coyote | Ander’s Substack | 13 hrs ago
Not to sound like a maga, but I do believe the polls are fixed.
There’s a lot of good evidence out there indicating as much.
I read most are owned by right-wingers.
This would explain the “ red wave” that never happened [the 2022 midterms - b] and also why Biden continues to poll low. I really believe he is far more supported than polls show.
Margaret Maier | 11 hrs ago
It may be that they are fixed by who they poll. If you poll all Republicans or Independents that lean Republican, you will get a certain set of answers.
Yeah, not much in the way of presenting evidence or anything … just some folks in the comments chewing the fat with the Substack’s author, Jay Kuo. Still makes me think, because what Margaret Maier wrote at the very end – touching on oversampling of Republicans – is easy to confirm for many individual polls, with multiple references in this very SDMB thread.
I’m still stewing over that one. I live in Wisconsin. I contributed to Barnes’ campaign the most I’ve ever given to a non-Presidential candidate. I KNEW, across the whole of 2022, the election was going to be close, and that Barnes could win it. Johnson is just so dumb, even if you lean towards his political position. And he conspired with fake electors!
Regular (with maybe a big systematic error for a tight race) polls still have a tie. According to Chris Matthews last week a third of “independents” did not know Trump was guilty.
That’s much better for Biden than I expected. I thought Trump was up a few points (like 5 - 8) in all the important swing states and thusly favoured in the electoral college (but not popular vote.)
But our forecast is different; its goal is a little more predictive, and our research has found that inferring across-state trends increases predictive accuracy. So our forecast both uses national polls to steer state polling averages and lets polls in one state influence the average in similar states. For instance, if President Joe Biden improves his standing in Nevada, our forecast will also expect him to be polling better in states such as Arizona and New Mexico, which have similar demographics and are part of the same political region.
According to the video, Dems MASSIVELY overperformed (like +20) in this ruby red district. Significant Dem overperformance seems to be a persistent pattern in almost all special elections around the country since 2022. Could this be Roe reverberations?
Also just BS, gamed polls. Why wouldn’t have stock honest, no-lean polling caught those Roe reverberations (or other factors leading voters to pull the blue lever)?
Forget the polls. We know they were off in all of the last few elections, and in 2022 they seriously overestimated GOP performance, sometimes even on purpose. That vaunted “red wave” never materialized, and the pollsters made lame excuses for why they were wrong.
Instead, let’s talk special elections. After all, polls don’t vote, people do. And those who vote in special elections are a special kind of voter: the kind especially likely to turn out for the general.
So despite the caveats I’m obliged to lay out … I still trust actual voting patterns over telephone polls, where a lot of political weirdos answer calls from unknown numbers and I’m-never-voting types still angry about everything get to vent their frustrations.
