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Guest Essay

By Kristen Soltis Anderson

Ms. Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer, is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups.

Now that we have a little more data about how voters are processing the new Kamala Harris-versus-Donald Trump presidential matchup, the poll unskewing — efforts to prove that certain unfavorable survey results are missing the mark — has begun.

Right out of the gate comes Tim Saler, a data consultant for Mr. Trump’s campaign, who takes issue with the latest CBS News/YouGov poll showing Ms. Harris ahead of Mr. Trump by one point nationally and running very close to Mr. Trump in the key battleground states. In an internal memo that the Trump-Vance campaign made public, Mr. Saler writes:

The latest CBS/YouGov poll of registered voters nationwide showing margin-of-error shifts in the national head-to-head ballot between President Trump and Kamala Harris is entirely the result of a methodological decision allowing ideology to change significantly, while maintaining weights on age, partisanship and race to make the survey appear not to have been manipulated. Without this manipulation, President Trump would be maintaining a 51-49 lead in their Aug. 4 survey.

There’s a lot of interesting and potentially controversial stuff going on with this poll and how it estimates the results in the battleground states, but for today, let’s unpack Mr. Saler’s particular complaint. His contention is that the only reason the poll shows Ms. Harris doing so well is a “methodological decision” about what factors to hold steady and what factors to allow to shift from poll to poll, with the implication that there were choices made intentionally that “manipulated” the results. (A Trump campaign senior adviser, Brian Hughes, went further, calling it a “national gaslighting campaign.”)

Whenever we pollsters conduct a survey, we know that the sample of people we talk to may not exactly match up........

© The New York Times