Josh Marshall: Who Knows What

[longship]

One of my favorite daily Web visits is Josh Marshall's Editor's Blog at Talking Points Memo. Josh always brings some responsible and sane commentary to the political milieu.

Here's a late entry:
Who Knows What

Let me share a basic premise with you. Right or wrong, it's informed my understanding of the race for months. The Clinton campaign has better information about the race than the media (i.e., public polls) or the Trump campaign.

This doesn't really help us civilians since we can't know what their numbers tell them. But here's why I think it.

Private campaign polling and public media polling follow significantly different methodologies. This difference has become more exaggerated over recent years. Premium media polling has stayed relatively the same - live caller surveys on landlines and cell phones. But it's also moved in the direction of online polling which may be or may turn out to be (there's no one standard methodology) as good as phone polling but has more methodological and quality variation and less of a track record. Private campaign polls generally work from voter lists - not random number dialing. They are a lot more expensive and rely much more on various sorts of data modeling. The private polls have more increasingly in this direction over the last few cycles while public polling raise remained largely in place.

To avoid getting myself in needless arguments and - more than that - to be as precise as possible, it is not so much that private campaign polls are more accurate as they are simply different. They are designed for a different purpose. A media poll is fundamentally designed to tell you who is winning and additional details about which sorts of voters are thinking different things. Campaign polls are 100% designed to give you information which can enable you to do things to win. That's a big difference in how you collect and present data. As it happens, I think they're also more accurate. Most political professionals in recent years seem to share this opinion.

Much more at link.

Enjoy!

[underpants]

1. Good read

Rec'd

[dalton99]

2. Hillary will be our next President. We need the down ballot as well.

[longship]

3. Yup!