Even with new Quinnipiac polls factored in, Hillary Clinton still leads Trump in every swing state
New Quinnipiac poll numbers were released today for several swing states which paint a far worse picture for Hillary Clinton than other current polling outlets have, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, because Hillary has always done worse in Quinnipiac polls than in other polls. Yet cable news is suddenly painting it as if the sky were falling, as if these are the only polls that count, as if Hillary is suddenly in real danger of losing the election to Donald Trump. But here’s the kicker: even when you plug today’s new polls into the average of the current polls in each state, Hillary is still leading in every swing state.
Interestingly, the Quinnipiac numbers wouldn’t necessarily be bad news for Hillary Clinton even if they did hold water. What they claim, essentially, is that Florida and Ohio and Pennsylvania are toss ups. But when you look at the number of other swing states where she has large leads, you see that if those hold, the three states I just mentioned won’t be much of a factor one way or the other. So even if these numbers were accurate, she’d still win the election. But they’re not accurate.
Quinnipiac has long been wrong about this election in a consistent manner, typically placing Hillary about five points below the consensus of other polls. On the other side of the fence, Reuters is just as consistently wrong in favor of Hillary; you have to subtract probably five points from her Reuters numbers for it be accurate. Quinnipiac says Hillary is up by just two points nationally. Reuters says Hillary is up by a whopping thirteen points nationally. They’re both outliers, without much to back them up. Most other outlets currently have her lead as being in the five to eight point range, which is probably where it truly is. And it’s not just these two outlets. Monmouth and Loras are sixteen points apart from each other in their latest Iowa polling; its unlikely that either one of them is remotely correct. Every other Iowa poll is somewhere in between the two. The only way to get anything meaningful out of state level polling is to take the average of all current major polls in that state.
And even when the averages are recalculated to include today’s Quinnipiac numbers, the averages show that Hillary Clinton is still leading in every swing state in the nation. Maybe this will become a tightly competitive election her the next four months, but it’s not one at the moment.
So why does cable news insist on peddling these new numbers from Quinnipiac that it knows are likely-inaccurate outliers, as if they were not only accurate but also the only poll numbers in existence in these states? Simple: they’ve spent the past week insisting that Hillary would somehow be hurt by her email exoneration, because that made for a more ratings-friendly story than simply admitting the email thing is over. Now they have to back up their prediction, so they’re reporting Hillary’s worst poll numbers. In fact I predicted last week that they would do this. Any time I think I’m being overly cynical about the motivations of TV news outlets, they always find a way to confirm my cynicism. And it’s nothing necessarily personal. If Trump ends up making a running mate pick that cable news has spent all week predicting would hurt him, they’ll follow it up by only reporting Trump’s worst poll numbers, so they can look like they called it right. Unless they’re willing to report new polls within the context of the averages, they’re lying to you by omission. And right now the averages say that even with Quinnipiac factored in, Hillary is still leading every swing state. Just look at the averages.
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