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Trump Adviser Doggedly Argues Unscientific Polls Are Legitimate

By Chris Deaton
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Here’s some post-debate analysis that’ll make your head spin. Spin right off.

Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller doggedly argued Thursday afternoon that unscientific Internet surveys taken immediately after Monday’s debate were evidence that Donald Trump was the evening’s supposed “winner”.

“The polls that happened that night, the night of the debate, the snap polls, the ones that happened online, those all showed Mr. Trump winning in a [yuge] way,” Miller told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who responded with disbelief.

“What scientific poll had Donald Trump winning? Give me one scientific poll. Everything else was—those are fan polls, man!” Todd said. “Those are polls that, like, computer programmers can mess with. Those aren’t real.”

Miller pressed on. “Those are a snapshot of what people are thinking who are actually watching the debate.”

They went back and forth and eventually laughed together.

“Jason, you’ve been doing this a while. You know those are bogus! You know these are bogus! They’re beyond non-scientific,” Todd said.

Here’s Jay Cost to back up Todd’s case:

The Drudge Report poll is not a scientific poll, and therefore its results do not tell us anything about what America as a whole thought. The same is true of other polls like those conducted by Time, CNBC, and the Washington Times. These polls are of no value for gauging public opinion. A “scientific poll” is typically one that uses a random sample of the population. There are different ways to create such a sample, but the important point is that it is not self-selecting. It is in this way that polls of just 1,000 people can accurately capture the sentiments of a hundred-million voters. Online pollsters, such as YouGov, do not utilize random samples, but they employ an intricate weighting procedure to create a panel that is representative of the entire population. … The Drudge Report poll is like the YouGov poll, in that it is opt-in; however, there is no weight given to the results. Everybody’s vote is counted equally, which means that Drudge’s sample is not representative of the nation, and therefore does not tell us anything about public opinion. It can only tell us about what his readers thought.

Read the whole thing here.

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