Recent Data The News Gets Wrong

GovTrack’s ideology score as presented on their website

The media has a bad habit of taking polls and data analysis at face value. I want to take a quick look at recent examples involving national polling for the presidential election and an analysis by GovTrack of the political ideologies of members of Congress. Bottomline: Swing state polling is much more informative than national polling and the GovTrack study doesn’t say what it claims to or what is being reported in the media.

A candidate does not win the presidency via the popular vote, but through the electoral college. In winner-take-all fashion (save Maine and Nebraska), each state awards its entire allotment of electoral votes (correlated to the state’s population as of the last census) to the candidate with the most electoral votes. Nationally all those electoral votes are counted and the candidate with the most wins the US election. Most people are already familiar with this because of the parade of commentary about how Hillary won the popular vote but lost the election. Therefore, if the national popular vote does not determine the winner, it makes little sense to focus on national polls because all votes don’t count equally. Only analyses focused on a state-by-state breakdown are worthy of consideration. Swing-states take center stage, whereas votes in solidly Republican or Democratic states are locked-in for their respective candidates. This breakdown by NPR from the beginning…