You may have seen that controversial Public Policy Polling (PPP) poll (that’s a term I never thought I’d use) showing that Hillary Clinton won the CBS News/Twitter/KCCI-TV/Des Moines Register Democratic presidential debate last night among Democratic debate watchers by a massive margin.
However, there are three major caveats with the PPP poll, the last of which is the most important:
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The poll was done on behalf of a pro-Hillary PAC — PPP conducted the poll at the request of Correct the Record, a pro-Hillary rapid response PAC that has publicly attacked Bernie Sanders and his staunch progressive values, including a well-publicized effort to tie him to British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. A term that me and others at Daily Kos Elections (DKE), the election analysis subsite here at DailyKos, like to use for this kind of poll is an “internal poll”. This poll is an internal poll for a pro-Hillary PAC (but not the official Hillary campaign committee). Keep in mind that internal polls can be, and often are, skewed wildly in favor of the campaign that paid for the poll or, in this specific case, the candidate that the outside group that paid for the poll is backing.
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81% of Democratic debate watchers polled were 46 years of age or older — Looking at various demographic, party/ideological affiliation, and other statistics that don’t involve the candidates, one only has to look at the third page of the PDF file that I linked to at the top of the post to find that only 19% of Democratic debate watchers polled were in the 18-45 age demographic. To put that another way, 81% of Democratic debate watchers polled were 46 years of age or older (in fact, the figures they have for the 46-65 and older than 65 demographics, 47% and 34%, add up to 81%). That is a considerably older demographic makeup than what a typical combined national Democratic primary/caucus electorate would look like, and it’s a considerably older demographic makeup than what a typical Democratic primary or caucus electorate would look like in any state. I would guesstimate that roughly half of the Democratic primary or caucus electorate in any state would be in the 18-45 demographic, if not an outright majority of the Democratic primary or caucus electorate.
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PPP/Correct the Record *may* have polled landline telephone users only — On PPP’s website, the methodology they gave for the poll is as follows: “PPP interviewed 510 Democratic primary voters nationally by telephone after the debate who had been pre-screened on Thursday and Friday as planning to watch the debate and willing to give their opinions about it afterward. The survey’s margin of error is +/-4.3%. This research was conducted on behalf of Correct The Record.”. It’s not 100% clear what PPP means by interviewing voters “by telephone”. It could mean that PPP polled landline phone users only, mobile phone users only, or a combination of landline phone and mobile phone users. Additionally, while nobody in my household was polled, my parents have a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone system that can’t neatly be classified as a landline phone or a mobile phone, as the VoIP system my parents have involves using the kind of phone that would typically be hooked to a landline system and hooking it to a wired internet connection instead. Given how old the age demographic of the poll is, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if landline users were the only ones polled, but I can’t confirm that. If PPP polled landline users only, then the poll is completely useless, given that landline phone users are becoming a lower and lower percentage of the national electorate, especially the national Democratic electorate, each and every month, as more and more people switch to using mobile phones only for phone service.
Compare the PPP/Correct the Record poll with a post-debate poll from CBS News and GfK, which was not done on behalf of any candidate or outside group, and shows Hillary winning the debate with a more believable 51% of self-identified Democrats and independent debate watchers (the PPP/Correct the Record poll only polled self-identified Democratic debate watchers) saying that Hillary won the debate.
With Hillary on the defensive over, most notably, her bizarre claim that she receives Wall Street donations because of the 9/11 attacks, and Bernie Sanders being attacked right here on DailyKos over, of all things, Ronda Rousey being knocked out by Holly Holm in a mixed martial arts title match, it’s no surprise that a pro-Hillary PAC is publicly releasing a poll with questionable methodology, if not an outright bunk poll, right after the debate. Also, I’m not a fan of Bernie supporters trying to use non-scientific internet polls to bolster their claim that Bernie won a debate, so I didn’t add a poll to this post.