Friday, August 26, 2016

The polls suggest that most of the undecideds will go for Trump

Let's take another look at the Trump v. Hillary polls.

It looked to me like the polls that nudge people toward choosing one candidate or another--as opposed to giving some other answer like undecided, don't know, etc--tend to yield a smaller gap.

I calculated a correlation between the size of the gap and the percentage of people NOT saying Trump or Hillary for the 13 recent surveys listed on either RealClearPolitics or the Huffington Post. I threw them all in there, including the ones I considered to be not-so-great surveys.

The correlation is .38 which means of moderate magnitude. In other words, when techniques are used to get people to take a side, Hillary's lead decreases. When nudged, the uncommitted tend to go for Trump. To illustrate, 23% of Reuters participants fail to give either candidate as their answer, and this poll shows Trump behind by 7 points. With the UPI/CVOTER poll, which managed to get all but 4% to make a choice, Trump came out on top by one point.

So this seems like evidence that the undecideds are leaning Trump, and in the end, most will vote for him. 

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