Who To Believe?

The polling numbers are all over the place.

Which poll do you believe?

The broadcast media often quotes the Real Clear Politics poll, currently showing Hillary Clinton at +3.  Except it's not actually a poll.  It is an average of multiple polls taken by multiple polling organizations on behalf of multiple clients.  And because it's an average of polls previously taken, it tends to look backward rather than represent a snapshot of voter preference today.

Bill Mitchell, a radio talk show host and political researcher, does a good job of unpacking the data behind the polling results. (If you are on Twitter, follow him at @mitchellvii).  The polls that have Clinton ahead are always found to have oversampled Democrat voters compared with the percentage of Republican voters.  While the voter base does, in fact, include more Ds than Rs, that number is only about 3%.  Most of the polls that predict a Clinton victory include samples that are Democrat voters +7 or greater.

Those oversampled polls are included in the Real Clear Politics average.

The LA Times/Dornsife poll is interesting for several reasons.  First, it got the results of the Romney/Obama presidential election exactly right.  Second, it is taken every morning using the same 3,000+ carefully screened voters each time.  It is more accurate in measuring the mood of the electorate on any given day than other polls, and especially better than an average of backward looking polls.

The LA Times/Dornsife poll has Trump +5.6 this morning.

Here's another thing about polls:  They don't measure what may be really important.  Say a new poll comes out that screams [Candidate X] is +11 in Texas!!  Guess what - the +11 doesn't matter.  To win the Texas electoral college votes (what really matters) all that's necessary is that a candidate is +.01, or some number greater than the electoral margin of fraud and corruption.

Did you read the article linked by Drudge this morning, by the way?  Pollsters have contributed heavily to the Clinton campaign.  Not so much to the Trump campaign.  And per the leaked Podesta emails, the Clinton campaign has given (most) polling companies sets of instructions on how their sampling should be done.  And that stooge Frank Luntz has been doing polling work for the State Department (aka the Clinton campaign) for several years.

So.  Take the polls with a grain of salt.  The propaganda is baked into most of them.  Watch the LA Times/Dornsife poll with interest.  Wait for the "surprises" to dump sometime this afternoon in time for the Sunday morning talk shows.

And Tuesday night keep an eye on the vote tally in Pennsylvania.  Who wins Pennsylvania wins the election, that's my projection.