WASHINGTON
Donald Trump is making the same mistake as President Mitt Romney.
He insists that public polls showing him trailing Hillary Clinton are biased results because they “oversample” Democrats. But that’s exactly the same argument that a lot of conservatives used in 2012, wrongly convincing themselves that Romney would win easily and waking up shocked to find they were wrong and the polls were right.
The problem is, they claim something about the way polls are conducted that simply isn’t true.
That isn’t stopping Trump from railing against “oversampling.”
“When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading,” he said. “But you see these polls where they’re polling Democrats. How’s Trump doing? Oh, he’s down. They’re polling Democrats. The system is corrupt and it’s rigged and it’s broken.”
October 24, 2016 ">
Other conservatives were also solidly convinced in 2012 that pollsters’ “oversampling” of Democrats was hiding the truth that Republican presidential nominee Romney was leading incumbent President Barack Obama – by a lot.
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The conservative Breitbart website, for example, stated flatly in September 2012 that news media polls showing Obama ahead were deliberately skewed to help the Democrat. “As is becoming routine, these new polls again oversample Democrats,” the site said.
Another website called unskewedpolls.com doctored the news media polls to give Republican voters more weight. “The results have been staggering,” said a column on Fox News. “The re-weighted polls all put Romney ahead of Obama with margins of between 3 and 11 points.”
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Fox News commentator Dick Morris was so sure the polls were skewed toward Democrats and Romney was actually far ahead that he predicted that the former Massachusetts governor would win the White House with 325 electoral votes to Obama’s 213.
“It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history,” he told Fox’s Greta van Susteren in late October 2012. “It will rekindle the whole question on why the media played this race as a nail-biter where in fact Romney’s going to win by quite a bit.”
Obama beat Romney by 51-48 percent, earning 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206.
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Some still say the media are deliberately sampling too many Democrats.
“If we can put up that ABC/Washington Post poll once again, Donald Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton by 12,” “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said in during a June telecast.
“But what they don’t tell you . . . they actually talked to 12 percent more Democrats than Republicans. According to the Gallup poll, there are 3 percent more Democrats in the country than Republicans, so it looks like they’ve got a favorite in it.”
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The key to their mistake then – and Trump’s apparent mistake now – was thinking that the number of Democrats and Republicans in a poll should match party registration. They argued that any poll with more Democrats than the number they thought it should be was a biased “oversampling” of Democrats.
But pollsters often use samples of Democrats and Republicans based on a participant’s political self-identification at the moment, not registration. Some states don’t even have party registration statistics available.
Brad Coker, managing director at Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, said Trump was “playing fast and loose with the word ‘oversample.’ ”
“Most states don’t register by party, so you don’t know if 45 percent of the country is Democrat, 30 percent of the country is Democrat,” Coker said. “And it’s fluid. I know people who are lifelong Republicans who don’t like the Republican Party now, so they say they’re independents. It’s always changing.”
October 25, 2016