Quinnipiac’s Latino Problem: Shoddy Q Poll Strikes Again and Media Lap it Up (HRC GP) [View all]

Quinnipiac University has developed a reputation for outlier polls that consistently deliver bad news for Hillary Clinton and good news for Donald Trump. When we deconstruct their polls, Quinnipiac’s errors are glaringly obvious.

On June 29, we took apart a Q poll that showed Donald ahead of Hillary nationally by two points.



My colleagues Anthony Reed (predictive modeling expert and founder of the highly respected Benchmark Politics) and Eric Kleefeld pointed out that Quinnipiac was alone in its depiction of the race as particularly close. Most other polls at the time indicated a Hillary lead of between 4 and 6 points, and some polls placed her advantage at 8 points or above. Unsurprisingly, the Q poll got a wave of breathless media coverage. But a “unique poll result” is typically an indication of a bad poll result.



Here’s Quinnipiac’s fundamental problem: They tend to under-represent minorities. In their June 29 analysis, Reed and Kleefeld argued that polls like PPP, IBD/TIPP predict white turnout will be around 70 percent in 2016, down from 72 percent in the 2012 exit poll. Quinnipiac, on the other hand, has white turnout pegged at 73%. Another dubious finding in the June 29 Q poll is Latino support for Donald at 33% when most polls place it around 20%.

Quinnipiac’s reputation was already very shaky, in light of their dishonest, discredited, and widely disseminated 2015 poll announcing that in a word-association exercise, voters immediately thought of Hillary as a “liar.”

While Quinnipiac presented the poll as evidence that voters associated “liar” with Hillary, we demonstrated that it was Republican and Republican-leaning respondents to the Q-poll who linked Hillary to liar and other derogatory terms (including “bitch”). It is a vastly different thing for Republicans, parroting Fox news and talk radio, to hurl misogynistic insults at Hillary than for all voters to believe Hillary is a liar.

As Mediaite explained at the time: “As far as we know, only 35% of the people asked had something negative to say about Hillary Clinton.” But the way Quinnipiac and the media played it, Hillary was seen as a “liar” by the majority of American voters.