Trump misrepresents Democratic oversampling as “Voter Suppression”
At both rallies, Trump also referenced — and wrongly interpreted —another item in the news, an email, publicized by WikiLeaks, in which a Democratic operative asked the campaign’s internal pollster to over-sample Democrats in a survey so to provide more useful feedback about how to better target minority voters.
“WikiLeaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique, and that’s happening to me all the time,” Trump said in St. Augustine even though the email wasn’t sent by Podesta and offered no correlation to current polling of the presidential race.
Podesta did not write anything in the 2008 email chain Trump referenced, in which Tom Matzzie wrote that he would like “Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February” to “maximize what we get out of our media polling.” (If Podesta replied, his response is not included in the emails published by WikiLeaks.)
According to Pew Research Center, oversampling is sometimes used to ensure that there are enough members of a particular subgroup within a population to reduce the margin of error. That nuance, however, was neglected by Trump as he argued — falsely — that the email somehow offered evidence that professional pollsters are biased against him and oversampling Democrats.
“When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading,” Trump claimed. “But you see these polls, where they’re polling Democrats — ‘How’s Trump doing? Oh, he’s down’ — they’re polling Democrats.”
“In an email, Podesta says that he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling,” Trump stated incorrectly. “It’s called voter suppression because people will say, ‘Oh, gee, Trump’s down.’ Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning.”
To many of his supporters, however, the word of Trump, however fungible it may be, holds more sway than any media attempt to correct it.
.. For more than a year, the former reality TV star has sought to inoculate himself against the media’s fact-checking and the political establishment’s pointed criticism with claims that both entities are inherently corrupt