You'd Have to Be On Mushrooms to Believe Trump Is Beating Biden By 20 Points Among Young Voters
If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?
Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.
The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.
Here's a writeup by FiveThirtyEight that happens to now be a part of ABC but didn't participate in this pill: How outlier polls happen — and what to do with them
These polls also don't sample people who use call screening (Google Voice for me) to ask unknown callers to say their name, because this breaks most robodialers.
There are dozens of us!!
That's a good write-up. I generally agree with 538's philosophy on outliers, include them in the data but weigh them less heavily.