How to think about “unskewing” the polls
Pay no attention to the pollster behind the curtain
Today was an interesting day to be a political data journalist. It’s not every day that the president advances some controversial theories in public opinion research by [*checks notes*] commissioning a report from his pollsters to abuse other data in order discredit prominent media pollsters. But let’s look beyond how he said it (go here for a quick brief) and consider what criticism the president levied.
In essence, the president’s consultants alleged that popular live-caller polls have too many Democrats in them, biasing numbers against the president. For the particular polls that he analyzed, that doesn’t seem true (at least not prima facie). Twitter responded by rightly calling him out.
But the theory of this objection is certainly theoretically sound; if a poll did have too many Democrats in it, it probably would overestimate support for Democratic candidates. No surprise there. There’s even some evidence that this happens in practice:
