New Iowa Poll.... [View all]

[boomer_wv]

There is a new Iowa poll out from Neighborhood Research and Media. It's problematic for a few reasons that I will get into.

First let's get the top line results out of the way. It has Biden leading with 23% followed by Buttigieg (17), Warren (15), Klobuchar (11), and Sanders (10).

The first sign that there might be a problem with the poll is that Donald Trump is in 6th place at 5%....in a Democratic Caucus poll of people who claim to be definite voters.

2nd is the pollster and publication. The firm is run by Rick Shaftan who is a name you might recognize from some other GOP strategy (read propaganda) firms and his history of being racist and getting fired from campaigns when people notice his racism. And the publication...Beitbart, needs no introduction.

3rd is just reading the release of the poll. It reads like something a college freshman would write after looking at data in their first Poly Sci class, and that's being generous. Essentially the poll shows no understanding of basic statistics. One example, the author describes Biden as in "Freefall" because on the first night of polling he was at about 30% and on the following night was at 20%. However, looking at n for each night, you can see both samples are pretty small, so the confidence intervals are pretty huge. More likely the first night was just, by chance, made up for a higher number of Biden supporters and the 2nd, by chance, was a little lower. This is why we don't see reputable pollsters talking about how their samples broke down by the day they sampled, because those samples are too small to be reliable. Even the total n for this poll, 300, is borderline too low to be useful.

This doesn't even delve into their sampling methods, poll design, weighting etc.

Of course, this also assumes that the poll isn't just entirely made up and given the sources is entirely possible.

I just want to post this information before anyone else sees the poll topline and starts a discussion without looking a little deeper into it. If you want to take the topline and include it in an average, I don't think that's going to cause a lot of harm, but I wouldn't look at the poll and see it as anything indicative of the actual race.