Exclusive — Pollster Reports Swing-state Anomaly: ‘Republicans’ Backing Democrat CandidatesJoel B. Pollak 4 Nov 2022
A sizable group of participants in online political surveys appears to be affecting swing-state polling by answering every question as if they are Republicans, but then reporting that they intend to vote for the Democratic candidate, according to one major pollster.
Mark Mitchell, the head pollster at Rasmussen Reports, told Breitbart News Friday that the company became aware of a trend in August in swing-state polling in which the percentage of respondents who said they planned to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 would roughly match the Republican Party’s lead on the “generic” ballot question, but the Republican candidate would trail by six to eight points.
For example, Mitchell said, in one Nevada poll, Trump led by 12 points, and Republicans by nine, but Republican candidates had narrower leads of five points. Looking at Arizona, the trend was even clearer, where some Trump voters said they preferred incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly.
Furthermore, Mitchell said, voters who said they were Republicans, but who then chose the Democratic candidate, tended to be those who were responding to online polls, rather than traditional telephone polls, by a “three- or four-to-one margin.”
After digging into the data about the respondents, Mitchell discovered “a lot of people lying about their demographics.” He said there were discrepancies between demographic data self-reported by online respondents, and data associated with the IP addresses from which they were completing the polls. “The IP says a 40-year-old woman, but the participant says a 65-year-old man,” Mitchell said, offering a hypothetical example.
Notably, he said, these anomalies did not happen among self-identified Democrats: he found no examples of people claiming to be Democrats and then saying they backed the Republican candidate on the final ballot question.
The overall effect could be to make these swing-state polls appear more favorable to Democrats than they otherwise might have been.
Pollsters draw online respondents from panels created by survey companies. Though their national panels are large, their panels in individual states can be smaller, Mitchell said. That meant a small anomaly could have a large impact on a swing-state poll.
He added that Rasmussen had not picked up the anomaly in its extensive state polling in 2020, so the phenomenon seems to be new.
Mitchell’s observation was seconded by Richard Baris, director of Big Data Poll. “You cannot verify whether or not you’re talking to an actual voter” in many online polls, he said.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/11/04/exclusive-pollster-reports-swing-state-anomaly-republicans-backing-democrat-candidates/
