The folks at Investor's Business Daily are more than a little tired of seeing their IBD/TIPP (TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics) polls smeared by establishment press publications and pundits.
No similar torrent of criticism has been directed at other polls which have been horribly inaccurate predictors of actual election outcomes. A large majority of them seriously and oh-so-predictably underestimated support for conservative and center-right candidates and causes in 2014 and 2015.
The immediate issue is Fox Business News's selection of IBD/TIPP's GOP presidential poll as one of four it used in determining who will participate in the main Republican debate this evening. Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee didn't make the cut, and their campaigns are complaining furiously.
That's understandable. What isn't understandable — or forgivable, given how awful so much other polling has proven to be — is that journalists who should and probably do know better are joining the IBD/TIPP pile-on.
Let's start with Politico.
Nothing published at this alleged news site, which is really devolving into Salon.com without the profanity, should surprise anyone any more, given its horridly inaccurate and sloppy attempts at smearing Ben Carson.
As to Politico's treatment of IBD/TIPP polling, a few days ago, as IBD's John Merline reported, two of its reporters brazenly denigrated it, even though the web site praised the polling operation a mere two years ago (links are in originals, and bolds are mine throughout this post):
On Thursday, for example, Politico ran a story saying that Huckabee's downgrade "was a surprise" and driven by Fox's including the IBD/TIPP Poll in its average. Politico's Daniel Strauss and Hadas Gold added, "That poll is little known and considered less transparent than other surveys."
Strauss and Gold should have consulted their own publication before making such claims. Politico ran a glowing article two years ago focusing on Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, IBD's polling partner. The story noted that in the last three presidential elections, IBD/TIPP "came closer than anyone to the actual results" and that Mayur's secret was that the pollster "stick(s) to tried-and-true methods."
Rather than trashing IBD/TIPP, Strauss and Gold should be demanding that other pollsters who have been failing miserably figure out what those apparently elusive "tried-and-true methods" are — because, as I noted after the 2014 polling debacle, it appears that for other pollsters, "If they're right from now on, it will only be by accident."
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has been particularly outspoken — and uninformed — about IBD/TIPP, claiming that "It is historically inaccurate and bad, and it's almost like they cherry-picked the one poll to specifically keep Chris Christie off the stage."
Merline responded with the following inconvenient (for Scarborough and Mediaite, which added its own mangling) facts:
As for Scarborough's claim that IBD's was "rated one of the worst in 2012," it was in fact rated the most accurate by Nate Silver, who analyzed results of more than 20 tracking polls over the final three weeks of the 2012 campaign.
In reporting Scarborough's erroneous claims, the Mediaite blog site added another one of its own, with an out-of-context quote from Silver.
"As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight famously noted in 2009, 'They had John McCain winning the youth vote 74-22 — the IBD/TIPP polling operation has literally no idea what they're doing.'"
Silver was in fact complaining about a 2009 IBD/TIPP poll of doctors — which no other pollster had done up until then -- that found widespread opposition to ObamaCare among doctors, 45% of whom said they'd consider quitting if it went into effect. In an attempt to bolster his attack, Silver reached back to one, nonrepresentative finding from IBD's 2008 presidential tracking poll.
But it turns out that Silver, not IBD, had it wrong about ObamaCare and doctors.
More than a year after the IBD poll came out, a Physicians Foundation survey found that 40% of doctors said that they would "retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care or seek a job or business unrelated to health care" over the next three years as the overhaul is phased in. Its survey last year found that 44% said they planned to retire, cut back on the number of patients they see, work part-time or close their practice to new patients.
The Mediaite blog post to which Merline refers still links to Silver's post on the "untrustworthy" doctors' poll, while still pretending that it's really about the 2008 presidential election.
After Scarborough repeated his smear Monday morning in an interview with Christie himself, IBD published an editorial thanking Scarborough tongue-in-cheek for mentioning its polling, but seriously demanding an apology:
Thank You, Joe Scarborough, For Being So Biased And Fact Challenged
... IBD/TIPP's final 2008 poll results were the most accurate of any poll that year — as they were in 2004.
IBD/TIPP also had the best — as in, opposite of "worst" — record for accuracy in 2012, according to FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver, who wrote in the New York Times that IBD's tracking poll was closest to the actual results in the final three weeks of the 2012 campaign.
... For that matter, we could also say that for a journalist to get the facts wrong is understandable, but to knowingly repeat the misinformation three days later — and only to benefit a particular candidate — is inexcusable.
We could add that MSNBC's apparent indifference to the truth helps explain why its credibility, and its ratings, are in the toilet.
We would be perfectly justified in saying all those things. But the fact is that Scarborough's ignorant, biased rant helped bring our poll to the attention of other news outlets —with far larger audiences than "Morning Joe" — where actual journalists did their own reporting and noted IBD's stellar record for accuracy.
So thanks, Joe, for helping spread the word. But you still owe us an on-air apology.
He sure does.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
