Poll: Trump Drawing More and More Black Support

Womp womp.

Zogby "oversampled" black voters in his latest survey and found that the support was 27%, but he also measured support in head-to-head matchups with 2020 Democratic candidates to put that support to an election test.

In all cases, while black support for Trump dropped when an alternative was offered, it was higher than the 8% he received in 2016 and maybe enough to push him across the finish line first in 2020.

Against Joe Biden, Trump receives 12% of the black vote. Against Sen. Bernie Sanders, it was 14%. And against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, it was 17%.

While he had a 5% margin of error, Zogby said the trend is clear. "If Trump is able to up his numbers over 10% or near 15%, and with a lower turnout among African Americans because they are not excited by the field of candidates or turned off by D.C., Trump could really benefit from this scenario in the 2020 general election," he told us.

By the way, "oversampling" is not in itself a problem. You oversample smaller subgroups when you want to ask specific questions of them and still get a statistically accurate result. You need around 400 respondents in any sub-group to say something statistically meaningful about them. In a normal poll of all Americans, if you polled 800 people total, you'd only wind up talking to around 100 blacks, which is not a big enough sample to be statistically valid. So instead you keep calling, trying to get more blacks, until you get around 400.

That doesn't mean the rest of the poll is invalid -- a pollster would in the end weight that black sample down to the level it is throughout the country for the "all respondents" part of the poll. He wouldn't leave the oversample in unadjusted.

posted by Ace of Spades at 12:26 PM

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