Federal Court Makes Major Ruling on Ballot Verification in Pennsylvania
Jon Stewart's Skewering of Trump in New York Civil Fraud Cause Just Blew...
Did the Hosts of 'The View' Do Their Homework When They Invited This...
Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced in Massive Crypto Fraud Case
Charlotte Radio Host Speaks Out About His Interview With KJP That Made Headlines
Trump, Biden Will Both Be in New York on Thursday...but for Very Different...
Democrat Flips Republican District in Alabama Special Election. Here's What She Campaigned...
Here's What Trump Had to Say About RFK Jr.'s VP Pick
VDH Explains What Any 'Normal' President Would Do About Border That Would End...
Tennessee Music Venue to Host ‘Trans Day Of Vengeance’ Event One Year After...
There Was Very Little Pete Buttigieg Was Able to Tell Us About Bridge...
An Illegal Alien Encouraged Others to Invade American Homes. Here's What Happened Next.
Time for Another Bizarre, Easily-Disprovable Lie From Joe Biden
Did Jamaal Bowman Just Help His Primary Challenger?
Fani Willis Calls Jim Jordan's Investigation Into Her Office 'Politically Motivated'
Tipsheet

No, That Podesta/Wikileaks Email Doesn't Prove Democrats Are Rigging Media Polls

This story started making the rounds on social media over the weekend, eventually catching fire due to Trumpworld's desperation to latch onto any piece of "evidence" -- no matter how embarrassingly ludicrous -- that the election is "rigged." (Reminder: The media turned exceedingly negative on Trump after the primaries, and the Clinton email investigation was highly questionable, but the electoral process itself is above-board and widely untainted). This latest conspiracy theory is that a Wikileaks-hacked email from John Podesta "proves" that Hillary's campaign is colluding with the mainstream media to rig the polls to make it appear as though Trump is losing. Trump himself appeared to amplify the bogus storyline on Twitter, because of course he did:

Advertisement

Here's what "the the Trump" is referring to:

See? They're deliberately oversampling Democrats to make it look like Trump is losing!  Or not.  The only thing that's remotely accurate about any of this is that Podesta used the word "oversamples," and mentioned "media polling" in the email.  But there's less to this supposed 'gotcha' than meets the eye.  Much less.  First of all, oversampling is an long-established polling practice with a very specific definition, described here by Pew Research (via Bradd Jaffy):

For some surveys, it is important to ensure that there are enough members of a certain subgroup in the population so that more reliable estimates can be reported for that group. To do this, we oversample members of the subgroup by selecting more people from this group than would typically be done if everyone in the sample had an equal chance of being selected. Because the margin of sampling error is related to the size of the sample, increasing the sample size for a particular subgroup through the use of oversampling allows for estimates to be made with a smaller margin of error. A survey that includes an oversample weights the results so that members in the oversampled group are weighted to their actual proportion in the population; this allows for the overall survey results to represent both the national population and the oversampled subgroup.
Advertisement

Click through for an explanation of how this methodology applies to African Americans, a subgroup Pew uses to illustrate how oversampling works. There is nothing controversial here. Oh, and Podesta's email was sent in January...of 2008. So his brief missive on polling comes from two presidential cycles ago, during the Democratic primary.  Bottom line: Even a cursory inspection reveals that this isn't what some people think it looks like.  If you're jonesing for a "the polls are wrong" argument, the Kentucky case study is probably your best bet at this stage.  I'll leave you with Trump's campaign manager conceding the obvious -- "we are behind:"

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Recommended

Trending on Townhall Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement