How To Skew The Results Of A Poll

Yesterday The European Union Times posted an article about the latest Reuters Presidential Poll. The poll claims 47 percent of Americans support Hillary Clinton for President and 33 percent support Donald Trump for President.

The article states:

Reuters interviews 1201 respondents.
626 Democrats (52% of total)
423 Republicans (35% of total)
122 independents
30 other party.

That’s nearly 33 percent more Democrats than Republicans.

In reality Gallup reported in March that 46 percent of Americans are Democrats, and 40 percent are Republicans. Reuters freighted their poll with 20 percent more Democrats than Republicans.

Since the Reuters poll sampled more Democrats than all the others combined, we can safely say that Trump appears to be in much better shape than the poll suggests and could likely be headed to a landslide victory in November.

This is the equivalent of my polling 100 cat owners as to whether of not they like cats and concluding from the results that everyone likes cats. Obviously, that is not true. This sort of polling may explain why the polls showed that the vote on Brexit would be for Britain to stay in the European Union. Polls have become a political tool rather than an indication of how people think. People tend to want to be part of the majority, so all the pollsters have to do is convince the voters that a particular candidate the pollsters support is winning.