Donald Trump is giving a raging, rambling speech with accusations against everyone and everything. But there’s one thing he flagged that everyone needs to understand the details about.
Here’s what he said …
Wikileaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling democrats, a voter suppression technique. That’s happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading. But you see these polls where they’re polling democrats. How is Trump doing? Oh, he’s down. They’re polling democrats. The system is corrupt, rigged and broken. And we’re going to change it.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Thank you, thank you. In an e-mail podesta says he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling. It’s called voter suppression because people will say, oh, gee, Trump’s down. Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning. These thieves and crook, the immediate, yeah not all of it, not all of it, but much of it — they’re the most crooked — they’re almost as crooked as Hillary. They may even be more crooked than Hillary because without the media, she would be nothing.
Now this immediately this grabbed my attention because over the weekend I was flabbergasted to see this tweet being shared around the Trumposphere on Twitter.
Todays Wikileaks dump revealed the DNC works w/ pollsters to skew polls in their favor by over-polling Democrats & under-polling Republicans pic.twitter.com/tVA8K6n79T
— Taylor Egly (@TaylorEgly) October 24, 2016
I don’t know who Taylor Egly is. But he has 250,000 followers – so he has a big megaphone on Twitter. This tweet and this new meme is a bracing example of just how many of the “scoops” from the Podesta emails are based on people simply not knowing what words mean.
Trump had already mentioned ‘over-sampling’ earlier. But here he’s tying it specifically to the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks. This tweet above is unquestionably what he’s referring to.
There are several levels of nonsense here. Let me try to run through them.
You’ll note for starters that that the email is from 2008 and Podesta is neither the sender nor the recipient. But that’s just a footnote. More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC’s own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can’t affect media polls and they can’t have anything to do with voter suppression.
Now you may be asking, why would the Democrats skew their own internal polls? Well, they’re not.
The biggest thing here is what the word ‘oversampling’ means. Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group. So let’s stay you have a likely voter poll with 800 respondents. The number of African-Americans in that sample is maybe going to be 100 people, maybe less. 800 people is a decent sample for statistical significance. 100 is not. So if you’re trying to draw conclusions about African-American voters, levels of approval, degree of opposition or support of a candidate, demographic breakdowns, etc. you need to get an ‘over-sample’ to get solid numbers.
Whether it’s public or private pollsters, the ‘over-sample’ is never included in the ‘topline’ number. So if you get 4 times the number of African-American voters as you got in a regular sample, those numbers don’t all go into the mix for the total poll. They’re segmented out. The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them. To do so, to zoom in, you need to ‘over-sample’ their group as what amounts to a break-out portion of the poll.
What it all comes down to is that you’re talking about a polling concept the Trumpers don’t seem to understand (or are relying on supporters not understanding), about polls that are by definition secret (campaign polls aren’t shared) and about an election eight years ago. I have no clue who this Egly guy is. But people say all sort of stupid things on Twitter. What he thinks he’s found here is Mattzie calling up ABC News and saying “Hey, order from the DNC: sample way more Democrats than Republicans. Got it? Good.”
Again, people say stupid things on Twitter. But from Twitter straight to the mouth of the Republican candidate.
Amazing.
Sad!
