PoliticsDonald Trump perpetuated a baseless claim on Monday that pollsters were intentionally skewing polls to underrepresent his supporters.
Major story that the Dems are making up phony polls in order to suppress the the Trump . We are going to WIN!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2016The Republican presidential nominee appeared to be referencing a 2008 email revealed by the hack of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's private emails. In one email posted to Wikileaks, former Democratic operative Tom Matzzie requested that several groups of minority voters be "oversampled" in an upcoming poll.
On Sunday, Mattzie took to Twitter to defend his email, pointing out that oversampling is an extremely common practice used by pollsters to reduce the margin of error among minority voters and more accurately measure voter sentiment among that subgroup.
@TaylorEgly I wrote that email. Oversamples allow you to look at one demography with less MoE. You could learn that with a Google search
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016@kaceysharon you oversample to have better data on one subgroup.
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016@joshtpm No kidding. Oversampling is a statistical method to learn more about a single slice of the electorate.
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016@GlenCompton sure. Just do a search for the term "oversampling." It is a statistical method to adjust group distribution in a dataset. 1/
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016@GlenCompton Ex: If you want to know how "Unmarried Women" might respond in a poll of 800 voters, you might poll 200 more of that group 2/
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016@GlenCompton This increases the total survey from 800 to 1000 and gives you enough data to track the responses of that group. 3/
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016@GlenCompton Oversamples are used for states, regions, demographics. It is a way to look more closely at something in a national poll. 4/
- Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2016As his poll numbers have dipped over the past several weeks, Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims that the media, polls, and even state elections are being rigged against him.