Opinion

MEDIA BIAS: Despite Warnings, Pollsters Missed The Trump “Undercount”

AFP / Getty / Stringer

Stewart Lawrence Stewart J. Lawrence is a Washington, D.C.-based public policy analyst who writes frequently on immigration and Latino affairs. He is also founder and managing director of Puentes & Associates, Inc., a bilingual survey research and communications firm.
Font Size:

After Trump’s dramatic win, political polling in America may never be the same.

Going into Election Day, most of the major national polling organizations found Hillary Clinton ahead by 3-4 points.  Many predicted that she would win handily.  Some said it could be a landslide.

Even polling guru Nate Silver was flat wrong.   He’d angered liberals with a prediction that Trump would win Florida, which was correct.  But a day before the election, he boldly asserted that Clinton would sweep Florida, Ohio and North Carolina – when just the opposite occurred.

In the weeks ahead, many questions will be raised about American polling practices.  But will pollsters and the mainstream media organizations that so often support them admit that they were biased against Trump from the start – and skewed their polling accordingly?

For example, why did pollsters use a 2012 “turnout” model to weight their polling samples knowing full well that Democratic turnout was likely to be lower – and GOP turn-out higher?

That likely voter model, which also ignored voters who had never previously participated in an election, skewed the survey sample toward Clinton.  And pollsters knew it

Furthermore, why did so many pollsters doubt that some Trump supporters were concealing their support for him out of fear of being labeled “racist.”?

Some analysts had the gall to accuse the Trump campaign of spreading a “false” theory about a Trump “undercount.”

But that theory didn’t originate with the Trump campaign.  It started with a remarkable New York Times article by Thomas Edsall, one of the deans of American political journalism, and nearly every media and polling expert ignored it

Edsall compared the results of polls using live pollsters and those conducted online and found that respondents in online polls consistently showed much higher levels of support for Trump.  He speculated that online voters felt less constrained by “political correctness” and could show their true preferences.

The size of the undercount he uncovered was huge – about 8 points.

In an article published in late August, I repeated Edsall’s test and found a similar albeit smaller Trump “undercount” of 4 points.  And yet few media outlets took these claims seriously.

The undercount may have affected various voter groups, but none more profoundly than white college educated voters

For months nearly every major poll found that Trump was losing badly among this voter group.  Past Republican presidential candidates had won a majority of college-educated voters.  Trump was clearly “underperforming,” analysts said.

Consider, for example, a national poll sponsored by the Pew Charitable trusts in August.  The article announcing the poll was entitled, “Educational Divide in Vote Preferences on Track to be Wider than in Recent Elections.”

Pew found that college-educated voters favored Clinton by a whopping 23 points, 52%-29%.  By contrast, Trump only had a marginal advantage among voters without a college degree, about 5 points, 41% to 36%.

The implication?  Trump’s vaunted Rust Belt strategy focused on working class voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio was unlikely to pan out.  Furthermore, he was likely to get beaten badly by Clinton in suburban counties in these same swing states, Pew implied.

But it didn’t happen that way.  In exit polls released by ABC News yesterday, Trump beat Clinton among non-college-educated voters by 8 points, 3 points higher than what the Pew poll had predicted.

But among college educated voters the skew was even larger.  Trump lost by just 9 points – or 14 points less than what Pew had predicted.

Overall, that’s a 17-point unpredicted swing in the polling by educational level toward Trump.

What happens when you include race?  In the Pew survey, Clinton was expected to win White college graduates by 14 points.  But according to exit polls, Trump actually won this voter group by 4 points, another 18-point unpredicted swing.

And if you add gender, the polling skew is even worse.  Among White male college graduates Trump trounced her by 15 points, a more than 20-point swing from the Pew prediction.

Ironically, it was Pew in 2015 that sponsored a widely-regarded study of polling practices in which the group concluded that online polling during elections was likely to be far more accurate than live-polling.

But when it came to applying that insight to analyzing Trump’s polling support, Pew ignored its own past findings.  So did all the media polling groups that conducted live polling and that for much of the campaign found Clinton in the lead.

A lead that, quite possibly, in retrospect, never actually existed.

One organization did get the election right.  The LA Times/USC poll, which surveyed its respondents online, consistently found Trump ahead, almost from the start.  How did the mainstream media react?  They accused the polling organization of “bias.”

Polling, by definition, is an imprecise science.  However, it doesn’t help when most pollsters aren’t even pretending to practice real science.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel