An Oct. 18 Newsmax article by Bill Hoffmann took issue with a Pew poll showing that 54 percent of registered voters support President Trump’s impeachment, insisting that it was “stacked with Democrat [sic] respondents”:
But the methodology behind the poll appears to have stacked it in favor of achieving a pro-Democratic outcome.
Buried in the survey results is the fact that of the 3,487 respondents, 1,942 are Democrats or are Democratic leaning while 1,453 are Republicans or Republican leaning. That means 56 percent of those polled were Democrats compared to 42 percent who identified as Republicans — a 14 percent margin favoring Democrats.
Frank Luntz, a veteran American political consultant and pollster, questioned the validity of the poll.
“Self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans by about 6 percent nationally. The sample for this poll leans a bit too Democratic to accept these numbers as gospel,” Luntz told Newsmax. “When the questions are about impeachment, you have a responsibility to ensure an accurately balanced sample.”
Hoffmann failed to look closely at the poll’s methodology, which showed the weighted percentage spread — which “aligns the sample to population benchmarks” — was just 7 percentage points between Democrat and Republican — much closer to current self-identification numbers.
Hoffmann doesn’t mention weighting at all in his article, even though he got a comment from Pew telling him to look at the methodology.