The Polling Conspiracy

Donald Trump’s supporters have taken up the claim that polls are rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton because they “oversample” Democrats. The charge is based on emails published by Wikileaks, in which the 2008 Clinton campaign considers oversampling Hispanic and Native American voters.

Micah Cohen of FiveThirtyEight says the claim is a willful misunderstanding of how polling works and what “oversampling” means. Brooke talks to Micah, who is politics editor of the data news site, about how pollsters try to get it right, why they sometimes don’t, and what this latest conspiracy theory says about the industry in this election.

On The Media

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