Exclusive:
Pat Caddell Blasts Reuters’ Back-Rigging Polls to Show Clinton Winning
Speaking exclusively to Breitbart News,
political polling pioneer Pat Caddell said the Reuters news service was guilty
of an unprecedented act of professional malpractice after it announced Friday
it has dropped the “Neither” option from their presidential campaign
tracking polls and then went back and reconfigured previously released polls to
present different results with a reinterpretation of the “Neither” responses in
those polls.
“This comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results,” said
the legendary pollster and
political consultant. “I suppose you can get away with it in polling because
there are no laws. But, if this was accounting, they would put them in jail.”
The decision comes on the heels of a Breitbart News
report that shows a 17-point swing towards
Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump and away from Democratic
nominee Hillary R.Clinton.
“The looks to me, are far as I can indicate,
they have merely decided to go back and revise their numbers in a formula that
removes voters or allocates them–I am not sure how they are doing
this–proportionately,” he said.
Reuters has rejiggered its methods in order to
get the results they want, said the man, whose
out-of-the-box interpretations of the American electorate were the brain-work
behind the insurgent presidential campaigns of Sen. George McGovern
(D.-S.D.) in 1972, Georgia Gov. James E. “Jimmy” Carter in 1976, President Carter 1980
and Sen. Gary Hart (D.-Colo.) in 1984. In 1992, Caddell
worked for former California governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, who challenged
Arkansas Gov. William J. “Bill” Clinton. In the 1990s, Caddell became a popular
cable news guest and consulted on various television and movie projects. The
1984 campaign was a reunion of sorts, because Hart was McGovern’s campaign
manager.
“What they have done is unprecedented, he said.
“They have now gone back and changed their results.”
There are methods for projecting and allocating
undecided voters based on complex attitude structures, based on many questions
that tell the pollster that this person is in movement to support someone, he
said. “Sometimes, they are hiding. That happens. Particularly in the past, or
in racially-sensitive cases.”
Caddell cited two examples to Breitbart News. “On
July 25, they originally reported: Trump 40.3 percent and Clinton 37.2 percent,
which was a Trump margin of 2.8,” he said. “They have recalculated that
now–which I have never heard of–they changed that data, to be: Clinton 40.9 and
Trump 38.4, which is a 2.5 margin for Clinton.” The July 25 Reuters poll now
shows a result that reflects a 5.3 percentage point flip from the previously
published results, he said.
“Now look at July 26,” he said. “On July 26
they had Trump at 41.5 percent and Hillary at 36.3. That was a 5.2 Trump margin.
Then, in the new calculation, they claim that Clinton was 41.1 percent, Trump
was 37.5, and the margin was 3.6 for Clinton. Same poll. Two different results.
Recalculated, after you’ve announced the other results.” “What you get is an
8.8 percentage point margin change, almost nine points swinging from one
candidate, based on some phony, some bizarre allocation theory that you claim
you know where these people are or you are just leaving them out,” he said. “I
actually believe they are allocating them because they are claiming they are
really Clinton voters and they are using something to move them to Clinton.”
Caddell said he is confused by Reuters’
motivation. Writing to explain the change
in Reuters poll calculations, Maurice Tamman,
the leader of the news service’s New York City-based data mining and
investigatory reporting team said respondents in the “Year of Neither” were
using the Neither option to avoid revealing a decision they had actually made.
When events, such as a party’s national convention, compel the Neither
respondents to step forward with their actual choice it creates swings in the
poll results that Tamman said suggest shifts in opinion that were actually a
result of respondents hiding in Neither.
Caddell said at this stage of the presidential
campaign, in an election that is so volatile, the undecided are the most
fascinating demographic. “I want to measure the volatility. I can usually
tell–I don’t use the forced leans as much, I mean the really forced leans in
calculating results, like in 2014–what I am interested in is how those people,
who are now undecided get their attitudes and where their attitudes come from,”
he said.
The pollster said when you force someone to
make a decision they do not want to make or are not ready to make you are
contaminating the data. “What you are doing is altering their opinion,” he
said. “This notion that they are supposed to predict the election today in
these polls now is ridiculous.”
Experienced pollsters ask attitude questions to
flesh out the undecided voters, to see where they may end up when they do make
a decision, but also to understand how they are processing information and
what factors led them to a place where they cannot make a decision, he said.
Reuters themselves admit that there are social
pressures working against voters confessing their preference for Trump, so they
had to be aware that when they force someone to make a gun-to-the-head decision
that decision more often than not will default to the socially acceptable
decision of Clinton, he said. “Reuters says sometimes they default to Clinton–I
just don’t know what they are talking about.”
Caddell said he has always treating polling as
the equivalent of military intelligence. When he does a poll for a candidate,
he needs to tell the candidate his strengths, weaknesses, and the same for his
opponents. There is no incentive for rigging a poll’s sample weights,
questions, or forcing decisions to produce the result the candidate wants to
see.
As polls in the public space move from news to
entertainment, it is more common for polls to be set up to produce high-impact
news or entertainment value, which is different from gathering actionable
intelligence about the electorate, he said. Even further away from the true
purpose of political polling is the poll that manufactures with propaganda
impact.
The propaganda polls are actually the opposite
of poll-polls, he said. Instead of figuring out what public opinion reality
is, the propaganda polls are created to change existing public opinion
reality. “This idea of ‘We need a poll to give the result we want’ to fit
either our ideological or political needs is beyond dangerous,” he said. “It is
dangerous because it drives the news coverage and it is all by design now,
which is why everyone is in such shock at what Reuters did.”
Read More Stories About:
2016 Presidential Race,
Big Government,
Hillary Clinton,
Edmund G.
"Jerry" Brown, Hillary R. Clinton,
James E.
"Jimmy" Carter, Maurice Tamman,
Pat Caddell,
propaganda,
Sen. Gary Hart
(D.-Colo.), Sen. George McGovern,
Year of Neither
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