That sound you hear is the rejoicing of the progressives and their media pals over the new New York Times-Siena poll, as we are less than 24 hours until the week’s Sunday shows, which seems to show Democrat nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris leading Republican nominee Donald Trump in three, key battleground states. But there are strong reasons to doubt what’s usually a reliable polling outfit.
Let’s look at the numbers first. Here’s how the NYT celebrated the “dramatic reversal”:
Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald J. Trump in three crucial battleground states, according to new surveys by The New York Times and Siena College, the latest indication of a dramatic reversal in standing for Democrats after President Biden’s departure from the presidential race remade it.
Ms. Harris is ahead of Mr. Trump by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50 percent to 46 percent among likely voters in each state. The surveys were conducted from Aug. 5 to 9.
The polls….come after nearly a year of surveys that showed either a tied contest or a slight lead for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden. [emphasis added]
It continued:
Much of the newfound Democratic strength stems from improved voter perceptions of Ms. Harris. Her favorability rating has increased 10 percentage points among registered voters in Pennsylvania just in the last month, according to Times/Siena polling. Voters also view Ms. Harris as more intelligent and more temperamentally fit to govern than Mr. Trump.
Given that the legacy media has launched an all-out, lockstep effort to show Harris (and now her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz) in most positive light might have something to do with a jump like that in 30-days time.
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There are a couple of problems I see immediately, in the way the poll was conducted; the sample size is a tiny, 600 people. And the margin of error ranges from 4.3 to nearly 5 points, which skews to the high side for my taste.
But analyst Ryan Girdusky says there are even more “very big problems” with the poll:
The NY Times/Siena polls are very high quality but I see some very big problems:
Trump isn’t losing seniors by 12
Harris isn’t tied with white voters
Trump’s margin with non-college whites is in the 30s, not 13.I’d guess there’s some over sampling among older liberal women https://t.co/Ptk6W8siRR
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) August 10, 2024
In case you can’t read the post, he wrote:
The NY Times/Siena polls are very high quality but I see some very big problems:
Trump isn’t losing seniors by 12
Harris isn’t tied with white voters
Trump’s margin with non-college whites is in the 30s, not 13.
I’d guess there’s some over sampling among older liberal women
He followed up with why deep doubts rise for him when looking at the NYT-Siena poll this time:
I have a lot of respect for the people at the Times and hate being the guy who obsesses about the the crosstabs, but polling tends to be off when you have a lot of highly engaged liberal women oversampling, which is what happened in these three states in 2016
When asked to clarify what he’s asserting, Girdusky was thorough in explaining his rationale–and it’s worth sharing in full:
With very rare exceptions, the biggest indicator for future voting behaviors are past voting behaviors and averages among polling.
Trump won seniors last time by 6 and on average polls have him up by 8 among that demographic, which would seem about accurate.
So unless something radical happens to appeal to this demographic, it would hit about the same. Think Obama realigning college educated whites or Trump realigning blue-collar workers or Hispanic men.
This poll has Harris winning seniors in Michigan by 20, a 27 point swing from 2020. It’s just not in the cards.
The problem with crosstabs is in some cases like Asians, Hispanics, or blacks the sample sizes are too small to get accurate numbers and with seniors, there’s a tendency of overly active liberals (either registered D’s or Indies who always vote D) to want to answer the polls. Happened in 2020 and 2016 as well.
It’s refreshing to see analysis like this that doesn’t just fall in line with the Left’s chosen narrative, even with a poll that is generally respected as being evenhanded. As he says, this just doesn’t change so radically from one general election cycle to the next. There’s something off here.
You can see the full NYT/Siena poll results here.
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