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As new cases of the coronavirus soar in much of the nation, a new national poll now shows Democratic challenger Joe Biden leading President Trump by 15 percentage points.The Quinnipiac University poll – which was conducted July 9-13 – shows the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee with 52 percent support among registered voters, with Trump at 37 percent support.Biden’s lead is almost double the 8-point advantage he held in Quinnipiac’s previous survey, which was conducted in mid-June. And it tops 14-point leads Biden held over the president in CNN and New York Times/Siena College polls conducted last month.
The Quinnipiac poll used live telephone operators to interview 1,273 self-identified registered voters nationwide. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.An average of the latest national polls in the 2020 presidential race compiled by Real Clear Politics indicates Biden with an 8.1 point lead over Trump. More importantly, Biden enjoys single digit advantages over the president in an average of the most recent polls in many of the key battleground states where the general election will be won.
By this time, all major polls were using what was belived to be a much more scientific method for choosing their samples called quota sampling. Quota sampling had been introduced by George Gallup as early as 1935 and had been successfully used by him to predict the winner of the 1936,1940 and 1944 elections. Quota sampling is nothing more than a systematic effort to force the sample to fit a certain national profile by using quotas: The sample should have so many women, so many men, so many blacks, so many whites, so many under 40, so many over 40 etc. The numbers in each category are taken to represent the same proportions in the sample as are in the electorate at large.If we assume that every important characteristic of the population is taken into account when setting up the quotas, it is reasonable to expect that quota sampling will produce a good cross-section of the population and therefore lead to accurate predictions. For the 1948 election between Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman, Gallup conducted a poll with a sample size of about 3250. Each individual in the sample was inteviewed in person by a professional interviewer to minimize nonresponse bias, and each interviewer was given a very detailed set of quotas to meet. For example, an interviewer could have been given the following quotas: seven white males under 40 living in a rural area, five black males under 40 living in a rural area, six black females under 40 living in a rural area, etc. Other than meeting these quotas the ultimate choice of who was interviewed was left to each interviewer.Based on the results of this poll, Gallup predicted a victory for Dewey, the Republican candidate. The predicted breakdown of the vote was 50% for Dewey, 44% for Truman, and 6% for third-party candidates Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace. The actual results of the election turned out to be almost exactly reversed: 50% for Truman, 45% for Dewey, and 5% for third-party candidates.
