Former Vice President Joe Biden.
A new poll from Monmouth University shows a three way tie between Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The Hill. Biden shows 19% support while both Warren and Sanders had 20%. This is a major decline for Biden who 32% support last June. Kamala Harris was in 4th place with 8% while Corey Booker and Pete Buttgieg were tied in 5th place at 4%. Biden seems to be losing support from conservative and moderate Democrats with Warren and Sanders winning those voters over.
My Comment:
On the surface, this poll is very bad news for Joe Biden. It looks like Biden lost much of his support while Warren and Sanders are surging. Even more strange is that Kamala Harris has kept her support after a disastrous debate performance. It almost seems unbelievable. Indeed, I had a whole post worked up talking about how this spells bad news for Joe Biden
But a closer look at the poll shows why you shouldn't trust them. Buried in The Hill article is the methodology of the polling and it seems pretty clear that this one is garbage. Much like the polls during the 2016 election, it's clear that this one isn't reliable.
First of all the sample size is tiny. It's only 298 people, all of them Democrats. That's not enough to really capture too much unless you do some real statistical magic, and it doesn't appear that Monmouth University did.
Second, the margin of error is huge. It's +/- 5.7%. That's a huge margin of error and means that Joe Biden's support is as high as 24% or as low as 14. An almost 6% margin of error is huge and extremely unreliable. Good polling has a error rate around 2 or 3%.
This poll is pretty much meaningless for anything but talking about the dangers of polling. I don't think it measures much of anything. But it is a reminder that you should always look at the sample size, methodology and error margin of polling. If you end up believing polls like this, you end up being shocked by things like the 2016 election...
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