STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
More Questions About Skewed Hillary Polls Based on ‘Younger’ Voters
By Daily Bell Staff - July 13, 2016

A majority of Americans disapprove of the FBI’s recommendation not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime over her handling of email while secretary of state, and a similar number in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll say the issue leaves them worried about how she would handle her responsibilities as president if elected. Most also say the email controversy won’t affect their vote in the presidential election. But 28 percent say it leaves them less likely to support her, versus 10 percent who say it makes them more likely to do so. -ABC Poll

Pro-Hillary Clinton polls don’t make sense.

In fact, polling with such tiny samples doesn’t make sense anyway, but coming on the heels of other questionable polls favoring Hillary, this widely quoted poll only seems to raise further questions.

The poll, above, has been widely cited as presenting a negative picture of Clinton.

But as it attempted to question “younger” Democratic voters, perhaps the results could have been even worse than they were.

Maybe it is normal to seek out younger age groups, but certainly younger voters may be seen as even more emphatic in their preferences than older ones.

Alternatively, younger voters might have been less apt to pay attention to the questions, or more more malleable and eager to provide answers they felt would be seen as appropriate. In any case, emphasizing one demographic over another may be seen as injecting additional bias into the results.

It’s been pointed out that younger voters are often supportive of Bernie Sanders rather than Hillary, but these questions dealt directly with whether or not Hillary’s behavior changed voting decisions.

The answer was dramatically “no.”

In fact, according to the poll, two-thirds of Democrats approve of the decision not to charge Clinton and think the issue is unrelated to what she would do as president. Only three in 10 Democrats think she should have been charged.

We looked up the polling methodology HERE and found this.

Within each landline household, interviewers ask to speak with the youngest adult male or female at home; if no person of that gender is at home, interviewers ask to speak with the youngest adult of the other gender. Cell phone interviews are conducted with the adult answering the phone.

Some of those involved with Langer have faced polling questions in the past. HERE from the Huffington Post:

Emmy-Winning Iraq Polls May Have Been Tainted By Fabrication, Researchers Say

The Huffington Post Public opinion polls in Iraq since 2003 have been crucial to understanding the war-torn country. ABC News relied on polls for reporting that was awarded two Emmys — the first to mention public opinion polling.

But two researchers looking at Iraq polling data in 2011 found alarming patterns that they said suggested some results may have been fabricated by people in Iraq.

They wrote a paper describing their findings and sent it to the U.S. company in charge of the data collection, D3 Systems …

Representatives of Langer Research Associates, the company later formed that includes the pollsters who worked for ABC, and Lev & Berlin didn’t immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment after business hours on Friday.

Questions have been raised about ABC and the other big media companies in the past. CBS and NBC have been accused HERE of oversampling Democrats in polls, leading to skewed results.

But ABC has also been criticized as regards polling. An April Newsbusters article revealed ABC news stations featured negative Trump polling but didn’t report polls that showed negative Hillary results. See HERE.

Meanwhile, a Reuters Ipsos poll HERE shows Hillary Clinton extending her lead Donald Trump to 13 percentage points. This is up from 10 points last week.

Given the amount of controversy regarding Clinton, the advances she managed to make are certainly astonishing. Trump actually is seen to have lost ground in the same poll.

Conclusion: It’s been shown that people may change their minds about candidates depending on the messages received from polling, among other ongoing results. And the results of polling can be dramatically influenced based on the demographics involved. Generally speaking, mainstream polling raises questions regarding a regular, pro-Hillary slant, and that’s not going to change.

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