Is there a problem with the New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s poll of four U.S. Senate elections? After the poll results were published Monday morning, the methodology was called into question, particularly in response to a poll of the Arkansas Senate race between incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor and Republican challenger Tom Cotton. Most previous polls showed the race fairly close, with a small lead switching back and forth between the two candidates, depending on the poll. The Times poll, however, showed a 10-point advantage for Pryor, his largest yet.
How could this be? It could be an outlier, the result of some statistical noise that isn’t reflective of the reality. After all, the Pryor campaign’s own internal poll, released last week, shows the Democrat only up by three points. Or it could be a leading indicator that Pryor is winning the race, at least for now. But there were some curious elements in the poll’s sample that suggest the results may not be accurate. For instance, of those registered voters polled, 27 percent said they voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, while 26 percent said they voted for Barack Obama and 32 percent said they didn’t vote at all. That’s a one-point difference between Romney voters and Obama voters. But in Arkansas in 2012, Romney beat Obama by 24 points. There were some similarly disparate findings between the 2012 reality and the sample of 2012 voting preference in the three other states the Times polled: Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina.
