A sizable group of participants in online political surveys appears to be affecting swing-state polling by answering every question as if they are Republicans, but then reporting that they intend to vote for the Democratic candidate, according to one major pollster.
Mark Mitchell, the head pollster at Rasmussen Reports, told Breitbart News Friday that the company became aware of a trend in August in swing-state polling in which the percentage of respondents who said they planned to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 would roughly match the Republican Party’s lead on the “generic” ballot question, but the Republican candidate would trail by six to eight points.
For example, Mitchell said, in one Nevada poll, Trump led by 12 points, and Republicans by nine, but Republican candidates had narrower leads of five points. Looking at Arizona, the trend was even clearer, where some Trump voters said they preferred incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly.
Furthermore, Mitchell said, voters who said they were Republicans, but who then chose the Democratic candidate, tended to be those who were responding to online polls, rather than traditional telephone polls, by a “three- or four-to-one margin.”
After digging into the data about the respondents, Mitchell discovered “a lot of people lying about their demographics.” He said there were discrepancies between demographic data self-reported by online respondents, and data associated with the IP addresses from which they were completing the polls. “The IP says a 40-year-old woman, but the participant says a 65-year-old man,” Mitchell said, offering a hypothetical example.
Notably, he said, these anomalies did not happen among self-identified Democrats: he found no examples of people claiming to be Democrats and then saying they backed the Republican candidate on the final ballot question.
The overall effect could be to make these swing-state polls appear more favorable to Democrats than they otherwise might have been.
Pollsters draw online respondents from panels created by survey companies. Though their national panels are large, their panels in individual states can be smaller, Mitchell said. That meant a small anomaly could have a large impact on a swing-state poll.
He added that Rasmussen had not picked up the anomaly in its extensive state polling in 2020, so the phenomenon seems to be new.
Mitchell’s observation was seconded by Richard Baris, director of Big Data Poll. “You cannot verify whether or not you’re talking to an actual voter” in many online polls, he said.
Baris, who uses additional analytics to study online polling data, told Breitbart News that he had seen data that convinced him some participants were trying to game the system. “These aren’t real people,” he said. He added that “at least 20%” of respondents in his polls would be “quarantined” because his software would pick up attempts by participants to provide incorrect data that did not match the demographic profiles the panel had on file for them.
“It’s not widely understood or known” how people game the system, or why, Baris said, though he said it was a growing problem for many online polls.
“Lying to pollsters is nothing new,” Baris said, “but … statistically, this is far more significant than those traditional challenges and the disparity is much larger than other modes, such as phone interviews or SMS [text message].”
Ted Carroll, president of Rasmussen Reports, told Breitbart News that the anomaly had become so bad that the company had to discard some of its recent data from Arizona. “We just tossed a few thousand dollars in the garbage for our Arizona fieldwork,” he said.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.