I’m not a big believer in polls. Especially after the disastrous failings in the 2022 election predictions when they were almost universally unable to come even close to the final tallies.
And I especially don’t believe them when the organization that commissioned the poll is some left wing member of the mainstream, fake news, media.
So this one is a shocker…
President Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 6, 2023
Here's our analysis of the results.https://t.co/wnxQTSH8Ol
Not sure what the agenda is here, but I know they gotta be hating having to write this one.
And knowing a bit about how polling is done, I’m very surprised at this outcome.
Poll results are about two things: phrasing the questions and predicting the voter mix.
In a straight up and down poll, it’s hard to skew the questions. Do you prefer the strong but gentle leadership under Joe Biden or more of the nasty self-promotion we get from Donald Trump?
They’d probably get called out on that one.
But you can change the voter mix to generate the results you want. Add in a few more suburban white women, you get what you want as they will overwhelmingly vote D. Or, conversely, add in more white working class men and you’ll skew the results more to the right.
Now, I get it. We’re a year out from the elections so this poll doesn’t mean all that much.
But how did The Gray Lady end up with results that favor Trump?