After months of “Beto O’Rourke is within striking distance of Ted Cruz!” polls with biased samples, the media polling complex have finally been able to manufacture a “Beto O’Rourke is leading Ted Cruz!” headline.
And they only had to take oversampling Democrats to ludicrous extremes to do so.
Their poll sample had 47% Democrats vs. 43% Republicans among likely voters. (You can find it in question six, after you’ve cranked magnification up to 400% or so.) That’s a pretty accurate breakdown…for 1990. However, here in the real world of 2018, that oversamples Democrats by 16 to 20 points. That’s also why the same poll only has Texas Governor Greg Abbott up by only 9 points over the invisible Lupe Valdez campaign when he walloped Wendy Davis by 20 points in 2014.
“Ipsos online poll released Wednesday in conjunction with Reuters and the University of Virginia.” Note the “online poll” part. As inaccurate as telephone landline polling is, online polling is worse.
This isn’t a poll that should be taken with several grains of salt, it’s a poll that shouldn’t taken seriously at all.