{"id":28530,"date":"2016-06-17T14:55:58","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T18:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=28530"},"modified":"2016-06-17T14:55:58","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T18:55:58","slug":"how-to-lie-with-statistics-and-poll-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=28530","title":{"rendered":"How To Lie With Statistics And Poll Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was dismayed this week to hear that Hillary Clinton is leading <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Donald Trump\" href=\"http:\/\/www.trumponline.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Donald Trump<\/a> in the polls. I should have investigated a little further. It&#8217;s not that I think Donald Trump is wonderful, I just think that Hillary Clinton is the more dangerous of the two. Anyway, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanthinker.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/after_correcting_for_bias_clintons_national_lead_in_cbs_news_poll_evaporates.html\" target=\"_blank\">The American Thinker <\/a>blog posted a article yesterday about the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Opinion poll\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Opinion_poll\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">poll<\/a>. The article investigated where the numbers came from.<\/p>\n<p>The article reports:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>However, based on the polling details, the final weighted sample of 976 <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Voter registration\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Voter_registration\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"wikipedia\">registered voters<\/a> is made up of just 28% Republicans and 35% Democrats.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>In the unweighted sample of registered voters, the relative percentage by party was 29% Republicans and 35% Democrats.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>So, during the weighting process, the poll increased the Democrat-Republican spread from 6% to 7%. \u00a0This relative weighting should have been headed in the other direction.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gallup.com\/poll\/15370\/party-affiliation.aspx\">nationwide polling data<\/a>, Republican Party affiliation has averaged 28% for 2016 so far, and it also averaged 28% since the start of May. \u00a0This agrees well with the <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"CBS News\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/cbsnews\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"twitter\">CBS News<\/a> poll&#8217;s composition.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>On the other hand, the last time the Democrats were at 35% was early March&#8230;of 2013. \u00a0Since May of this year, <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Democratic Party (United States)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.democrats.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Democratic party<\/a> affiliation has averaged 29%, just 1% higher than the Republicans, not 7% higher.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>By now I should know better than to listen to polls. The article goes on to explain that if the poll had taken an accurate sample, the results would have been a statistical tie. It is becoming obvious that Hillary Clinton&#8217;s foreign policy as Secretary State (actually it was <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Barack Obama\" href=\"http:\/\/www.barackobama.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"homepage\">Barack Obama&#8217;s<\/a> policy, but he never takes responsibility for anything negative) has made the world a more dangerous place. It will be interesting to see how well the media can spin that and if the average person figures out that she would be a disaster as President.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was dismayed this week to hear that Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump in the polls. I should have investigated a little further. It&#8217;s not that I think Donald Trump is wonderful, I just think that Hillary Clinton is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=28530\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[97,3357,1457,9103],"class_list":["post-28530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barack-obama","tag-donald-trump","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28531,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28530\/revisions\/28531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}