Stora tråden om Donald Trump [mod]

For some surveys, it is important to ensure that there are enough members of a certain subgroup in the population so that more reliable estimates can be reported for that group. To do this, we oversample members of the subgroup by selecting more people from this group than would typically be done if everyone in the sample had an equal chance of being selected. Because the margin of sampling error is related to the size of the sample, increasing the sample size for a particular subgroup through the use of oversampling allows for estimates to be made with a smaller margin of error. A survey that includes an oversample weights the results so that members in the oversampled group are weighted to their actual proportion in the population; this allows for the overall survey results to represent both the national population and the oversampled subgroup.

Now, back to that polling memo in which senior Clinton adviser John Podesta and his team purportedly discuss a proposal from Atlas Project, a Democratic polling firm, for swing state surveys. Here the discussion turns to oversampling in the real sense of the word.

If a pollster expects that Hispanic voters make up 10 percent of a state’s population, which means that out of 1,000 voters surveyed, only 100 would be Hispanic. If a campaign wanted to know more about how Hispanic voters were responding to a specific message or what the deeper trend lines would look like within a subpopulation, a campaign would “oversample” that group and do perhaps 500 interviews with Hispanic voters.

But that doesn’t have any effect on the final outcome of the polls. There would still only be 100 Hispanic voters included in the 1,000-voter, horserace survey. The sample of 500 Hispanics would only be used for assessing that subset.

After all, campaigns want real numbers, not intentionally skewed ones. The idea that the Clinton campaign would pay for bad polling makes no sense.

What’s really disheartening here is that some people seem to believe that the private polls conducted for a campaign are the same as polls conducted for news organizations. It’s just not the case.

Both campaigns have aggressive polling operations, and both presumably do oversampling for key demographic groups to test messages and track emerging trends. None of this is nefarious. None of this is different than previous years. And it doesn’t have anything to do with how many people identify as Democrats and Republicans in national public surveys.

Anybody who says otherwise either does not understand how polling works or is lying.

Radio host Alex Jones is a big Trump fan — and Trump, for his part, has returned the favor. In December, he went on Jones’s show, telling the host, “your reputation is amazing” and promising him that “I will not let you down.”

Jones proved it on the latest edition of The Alex Jones Show, aired on Tuesday, when he blamed America’s ills on “the Jewish mafia.”

“They run Uber, they run the health care, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you,” he said, per Media Matters. Jones listed a series of prominent people with Jewish backgrounds he believed to be working with this mafia — Rahm Emanuel, Madeleine Albright, George Soros — and accused them of being part of a “global, corporate combine” in alliance with the Japanese, Communists, and other evil factions.