Politics

Fox News pushes bogus poll that shows Democrat Doug Jones up by 10 points

On Monday, Fox News pushed its credibility to the limit with a poll that claims Democrat Doug Jones leads Judge Roy Moore by 10 points.  As Breitbart noted, the contrast between the Fox News poll and every other recent major poll could not be sharper.

According to Breitbart:

Earlier on Monday, an Emerson Poll was released that shows Moore up by nine points, 53 percent to 44 percent.

The five other most recent polls featured in the Real Clear Politics Average of Polls all show Moore in the lead.

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So how did this happen?  Breitbart explained further:

The Fox News Poll released on Monday “was under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R),” and included a respondent sample of likely voters that included 44 percent Republicans, 42 percent Democrats, and 14 percent independents (Republican +2) (see political identification after question 7 here), which significantly oversamples Democrats.

One way to understand the actual voting behavior of Alabamians is to look at the results of the 2016 election in the state. President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by a margin of 28 points, 63 percent to 35 percent.

That breaks down to a party affiliation of Republican +15, with Independents voting for President Trump by about a two to one margin. This is similar to the party affiliation breakdown seen in the samples of respondents in the five recent polls that show Moore in the lead.

It’s not the first time Fox has done this, Breitbart said.  A November 16 poll showed Jones up by eight, and that poll also oversampled Democrats:

The Fox News Poll sample of 649 likely voters included 48 percent Republicans, 42 percent Democrats, and ten percent independents, which appears to be an unusual oversampling of Democrats and undersampling of Republicans. [Note: See political identification after question 24 on page 8 of the poll]

Party affiliation of the Fox10/Strategy Research Poll was not included in the story announcing its results, but another poll included in the current Real Clear Politics Average of Polls conducted by Opinion Savvy on November 9, which showed the race to be a tie, has a very different weighting by party affiliation than the Fox News Poll.

The Opinion Savvy Poll conducted on November 9 of 515 likely Alabama voters included 58 percent Republicans, 29 percent Democrats, and 13 percent independents.

Another unusual aspect of the Fox News Poll released on Thursday that shows Democrat Jones with an eight-point lead over Moore is that it appears to contain a sample of Alabama likely voters in which 51 percent voted for Donald Trump and 48 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

This calculation is arrived at by examining the results of question number eight in the Fox News Poll, which shows that 49 percent of likely voters in Alabama have a favorable view of President Trump, while 48 percent have an unfavorable view.

Michael Patrick Leahy said there’s one good thing to come out of this poll: “When the outcome of the Alabama special election is known late Tuesday night, the public will have a much better idea in the future about which polls to rely upon, and which polls to disregard.”

On a final note, yours truly spoke with Rabbi Eric Walker about the Roy Moore election last Monday morning. You can catch that video below:

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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