WikiLeaks: This Explains Hillary Clinton’s Polling Advantage

In 2008, a group of Democratic operatives were trying to figure out how to skew the polling conducted by liberal mainstream media outlets and political think tanks to promote their candidates and agendas.

The end product was what we’ve been telling you about for the past several weeks: “oversampling” of key demographics that are more likely to support those candidates and agendas. And now WikiLeaks has provided the “smoking gun” email that demonstrates the Clinton campaign’s close ties to the effort.

In the email, Tom Matzzie, who was a campaign consultant—billed as a “pioneering digital activist”—wrote to George Rakis, then the campaign manager for America Votes, a George Soros-funded PAC aimed at getting Democrats elected, and Andy Meyer, research director at The Atlas Project. He asked them for a meeting to discuss oversampling:

Hey, when can we meet? I also want to get your Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February. By market, regions, etc. I want to get this all compiled into one set of recommendations so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.

Crystal King, who has since become the political director for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee but was working for The Atlas Project at the time, wrote back to Matzzie:

Attached are the state by state polling and research recommendations from the ATLAS product that have been compiled into one document. Please let Andy or I know if you have any questions or need additional information.

In turn, Matzzie shared the information with Anna and Stanley Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in Washington, D.C. GQRR has provided consulting services to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and again this cycle.

Matzzie called the information “useful,” but suggested “due diligence.” Click here to read the entire report from The Atlas Project in Microsoft Word format. The 37-page document provides, in detail, how to specifically oversample polls on a state-by-state basis to rig the results in a Democrat’s favor.

In Florida, a key battleground state, for instance:

• Consistently monitor the sample to ensure it is not too old, and that it has enough African American and Hispanic voters to reflect the state.
• On Independents: Tampa and Orlando are better persuasion targets than north or south Florida (check your polls before concluding this). If there are budget questions or oversamples, make sure that Tampa and Orlando are included first.

And for national polling, The Atlas Project’s report states:

• General election benchmark, 800 sample, with potential oversamples in key districts/regions
• Benchmark polling in targeted races, with ethnic oversamples as needed
• Targeting tracking polls in key races, with ethnic oversamples as needed

Tyler Durden of the Zero Hedge blog wrote about how this plays out in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll:

Earlier this morning we wrote about the obvious sampling bias in the latest ABC/Washington Post poll that showed a 12-point national advantage for Hillary. Like many of the recent polls from Reuters, ABC and The Washington Post, this latest poll included a 9-point sampling bias toward registered Democrats.

Of course, while democrats may enjoy a slight registration advantage of a couple of points, it is nowhere near the 9 points reflected in this latest poll. 

Meanwhile, we also pointed out that with huge variances in preference across demographics one can easily “rig” a poll by over indexing to one group vs. another. As a quick example, the ABC/WaPo poll found that Hillary enjoys a 79-point advantage over Trump with black voters. Therefore, even a small “oversample” of black voters of 5% could swing the overall poll by 3 full points.  Moreover, the pollsters don’t provide data on the demographic mix of their polls which makes it impossible to “fact check” the bias … convenient.

Matzzie, who is now CEO of Ethical Electric, a “clean energy” company that operates wind and solar projects in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, responded to the WikiLeaks email via Twitter. He tweeted:

The only poll that matters is on Election Day. The rest is just content to sell ads on TV or scientific tools used by professionals

And:

Option 1: 8 years ago we presciently rigged 2016 polling. Option 2: the people commenting on this are being misled by a demagogue