Jesse Watters doesn’t know how polls work

Jesse Watters is onto it. Onto the whole thing. He’s figured it out.

The Fox News host knows that the media — that is, the media outside of his own right-wing channel — is hopelessly in the tank for Vice President Kamala Harris. And he has the evidence to prove it, as he revealed Wednesday afternoon on the show “The Five.”

“The media’s just gonna protect and elect” the Democrats, Watters declared. “They’re juicing the polls! I just found out, this country identifies R plus-2. And all the polls we’ve seen with Kamala doing so well, their samples? R plus-7! R plus-8! R plus-4!”

“These are fake polls!” he added. “Trump is going to kill her!”

“Well, we’ll see,” co-host Jeanine Pirro replied, moving on to another subject.

Perhaps she was confused, as you might be, about what Watters is saying. Perhaps she took it in stride, given that Trump’s campaign similarly disputed a poll this week. Or perhaps she realized, as you may already but certainly will in a moment, that Watters doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The first thing to point out here is that Watters misspoke. He was trying to say that the polls showing a lead for Harris were D plus-7 or plus-8, not R. Because the claim he’s making is that the population is more Republican than Democrat — that Republicans have a 2-point (plus-2) edge in identification — while the polls include more Democrats by a 7- or 8-point margin.

The next thing to point out is that the “R plus-2′ thing is a misrepresentation of what polling shows.

Watters is probably referring to Gallup’s regular polls in which they ask Americans “as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?” The most recent result, completed in the first three weeks of July, had Republicans with a 2-point advantage, as Watters states.

But you’ll notice on that graph that the two-party total comes up to less than 60 percent. That’s because the actual most-common identifier is “independent.” America is an “I plus-11″ country, if you want to put it in Wattersian terms.

Gallup, like other pollsters, then asks people whether they tend to vote more with the Republican or Democratic Party, which most independents do. Overlay that data, and you see that, in a sense, America is an “R plus-6′ country!

Or at least it was in early July, before President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for reelection. When Trump was leading in the polls, this was the Republican edge. It may change.

We should also note that this is self-identified partisanship. In actual voter registrations, Democrats have a substantial edge. L2, a political data firm, shows more registered Democrats in states where voters register by party and a growing advantage in its modeled partisanship for states that don’t have partisan registration.

(The modeled values, shown with the outlined bars below, use other indicators, including primary voting history, to estimate a voter’s partisanship.)

In other words, while Republicans have an advantage in identification at the moment, Democrats have one in registration.

All of this, though, ignores the other fundamental problem with Watters’s self-confident dismissal of polling: the results of a statistically accurate poll are essentially never an exact reflection of the people who participate in it.

You understand how this works in your own life. If you’re buying a Christmas present for your niece and nephew, you might get suggestions for popular video games from other teenagers. You find a representative opinion that you feel confident answers your question.

Pollsters have a far more rigorous way of doing this same thing. If they are trying to determine the likely results of an election, their poll has two components: talking to poll respondents and figuring out who is likely to vote. Then, using relatively complicated math, they ensure that the responses reflect the electorate.

Let’s say that you ask 100 Democrats and 80 Republicans how they plan to vote in an election, with 90 percent of each group picking their party’s candidate and 10 percent selecting the other party’s. By itself, that’s a 54 percent to 46 percent margin in favor of the Democrat. If you think, though, that the electorate will be 50-50? You can simply treat each Democrat response as eight-tenths of a response — what pollsters call “weighting.” The result is a 50-50 race.

This assumes, of course, that the estimates about who will vote are correct, which is by itself fraught. But, again, pollsters spend a lot of time and energy figuring out what the target population looks like across a range of demographic groupings. Then they do their best to match their respondent poll to the target population and weight the results to make up the difference.

Pollsters, after all, are in the business of accurately capturing public opinion and they know how to do their job effectively. If a pollster were consistently giving its clients inaccurate results, it would quickly find itself losing clients (unless the clients wanted inaccurate results, of course).

As Watters has said, he’s in the business of championing disarray on the left. If that means distorting crime data or misrepresenting how polling works, so be it. Watters knows how to do his job effectively, too.

Lenny Bronner contributed to this report.