MEDIA DIRTY TRICKS: CBS, NBC Manipulate Polling Data to Show Hillary with Lead Over Trump
But when you look at the data you see that they oversampled Democrats and that the raise is virtually tied — even after the non-stop drubbing Trump is getting from the press on a daily basis.
Sierra Rayne at American Thinker reported:
CBS News is now pushing the pro-Hillary Clinton polls in rapid fashion. Late on Wednesday, this media outlet released the results of a national poll claiming to show that Clinton holds a 6% advantage over Donald Trump in the direct head-to-head matchup.
Apparently, the poll “was conducted by telephone June 9-13, 2016 among a random sample of 1,280 adults nationwide, including 1,048 registered voters[.] … The data have been weighted to reflect U.S. Census figures on demographic variables.”
However, based on the polling details, the final weighted sample of 976 registered voters is made up of just 28% Republicans and 35% Democrats.
In the unweighted sample of registered voters, the relative percentage by party was 29% Republicans and 35% Democrats.
So, during the weighting process, the poll increased the Democrat-Republican spread from 6% to 7%. This relative weighting should have been headed in the other direction.
According to nationwide polling data, Republican Party affiliation has averaged 28% for 2016 so far, and it also averaged 28% since the start of May. This agrees well with the CBS News poll’s composition.
On the other hand, the last time the Democrats were at 35% was early March…of 2013. Since May of this year, Democratic party affiliation has averaged 29%, just 1% higher than the Republicans, not 7% higher.
As a result, this CBS News poll appears to be biased in favor of the Democrats by the same margin that Clinton purportedly holds over Trump, meaning that if the bias is removed, so is Clinton’s lead, and we have a statistical tie.
Likewise, NBC reported Hillary Clinton opened up a 7 point lead over Donald Trump this week. But, once again, if you correct for oversampling of Democrats you find the race is virtually tied.
The Daily Mail reported:
Hillary Clinton has opened up a 7-point lead over Donald Trump in an online poll that seems to reflect a ‘bounce’ for the former secretary of state after she wrapped up the Democratic nomination last week.
But the weekly tracking poll, from NBC News and the Surveymonkey company, included the opinions of 7 per cent more self-identified Democrats than Republicans – the same margin as the poll’s topline result.
That raises questions about the 49-42 result…
…he most recent Gallup polling on the subject, published in January, found the Democrats had just a 3 per cent advantage nationally. In that same survey, Republican-dominated states outnumbered those populated mostly by Democrats, by a 20-12 margin.
The raw information collected by Surveymonkey each week has generated a distribution of Democrats and Republicans that appears random, and it’s unclear how much it was tweaked to fall in line with Census and Labor Department numbers.
The polling data show nearly all the organization’s results this year have ‘oversampled’ Democrats. But one week’s results, published in January, included more Republicans.
Adding the sampling disparity to the poll’s margins of error, each of the last six week’s results can be seen as a dead heat if Democrats and Republicans were to come to the polls in roughly equal numbers this year.