Last fall, in the months/weeks leading up to the presidential election, we spent a fair amount time talking about how Democratic pollsters were setting themselves up for a massive embarrassment on election day with their obviously rigged polling data that consistently suggested Hillary had a commanding lead. In fact, just weeks before the election, the Washington Post published a poll showing that Hillary was well on her way to a 'blowout' 12-point victory (we wrote about it here: This Is How WaPo's Latest Poll Gave Hillary A 12 Point Advantage Over Trump). Needless to say, that never happened and those pollsters suffered the humiliating consequences of their biased 'math.'
Unfortunately, as last night's special election in Georgia makes all too clear, no one on the left seems to have learned any lessons from their presidential poll rigging debacle last November.
In fact, one prominent pollster even declared just 6 days before the election that if Ossoff failed to win it would mean that "MATH IS DEAD AND DATA IS BROKEN."
It means there's a 70% chance Ossoff wins and a 30% chance that MATH IS DEAD AND DATA IS BROKEN.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 14, 2017
Of course, the problem isn't that "math is dead" or "data is broken"...the problem is that rather than using data to arrive at a solution pollsters have resorted to starting out with a solution and then solving for the data.
Which is exactly what appears to have happened in Georgia. As the following chart points out, with just 9 days left until election day, pollsters were predicting a fairly easy win for Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff in Georgia's 6th district runoff...shocking, we know. But, just over a week later, the Republican candidate ended up easily walking away with the win, and served up another embarrassment for pollsters in the process as actual results swung 8.6 points from predictions peddled to the public just a week earlier.
So how does this keep happening? Well, it's not that surprising in light of the fact that Democrats literally wrote a playbook on how to rig polling data through "oversamples." As we noted last October in a post entitled "New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through 'Oversamples'", it all apparently has a lot to do with "oversampling" various minority groups.
The email even includes a handy, 37-page guide with the following poll-rigging recommendations. In Arizona, over sampling of Hispanics and Native Americans is highly recommended:
Research, microtargeting & polling projects- Over-sample Hispanics- Use Spanish language interviewing. (Monolingual Spanish-speaking voters are among the lowest turnout Democratic targets)- Over-sample the Native American population
For Florida, the report recommends "consistently monitoring" samples to makes sure they're "not too old" and "has enough African American and Hispanic voters." Meanwhile, "independent" voters in Tampa and Orlando are apparently more dem friendly so the report suggests filling up independent quotas in those cities first.
- Consistently monitor the sample to ensure it is not too old, and that it has enough African American and Hispanic voters to reflect the state.- On Independents: Tampa and Orlando are better persuasion targets than north or south Florida (check your polls before concluding this). If there are budget questions or oversamples, make sure that Tampa and Orlando are included first.
Of course, the intent of publishing these ridiculous polls is presumably to 'chill' the Republican vote...afterall, why go through the hassle of long lines at a polling station if your candidate has no shot at winning?
That said, the strategy only worked BEFORE the media and pollsters lost all credibility...so, why bother keeping up the charade? As we mentioned above, it's just getting embarrassing at this point.