The polling website where Republicans are always winning in a landslide | #206 - October 9, 2022

A math and history lesson on why "unskewing" the polls is so hard

Happy Sunday everyone,

Over the weekend, a new series of charts appeared on the webpages of RealClearPolitics.com, the right-leaning news aggregation website that also hosts averages of polls for upcoming elections. These site has been publishing averages since the early 2000s, and while they used to be a pretty comprehensive and fair collection of polling data I should note that the people in charge have routinely made some very arbitrary methodological decisions that have tended to have the predictable effect of skewing their numbers toward Republicans. This is why I have advised people to take their numbers with a grain of salt.

But the site’s new set of featured graphs makes me question altogether their broader commitment to creating comprehensive and unbiased aggregates of polls. Go to their webpage for the upcoming Pennsylvania Senate race and you will see two charts. The first is their usual average of polls, showing the shares of the vote they think John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz…