Over Polling the Elderly and the Myth of the unbeatable Biden
Every since Joe Biden entered the 2020 Democratic primary race, he has been getting enormous amounts of media coverage. The data website FiveThirtyEight.com recently released data showing that Biden has been getting as much coverage as the entire rest of the field combined, which is all the more unbelievable because there are twenty other candidates. This could help explain why Biden has been soaring in the polls since that announcement; most candidates do get an “announcement bump” when they officially announce their candidacy. However, a closer look at the polling reveals another key reason for his position as a polling juggernaut: the massive oversampling of older voters.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are, at present, the top two contenders in the Democratic primary based on just about every single poll out there. They are also polar opposites in a variety of ways. Biden is a long term insider with lots of support among the establishment, a long centrist record, and support for hawkish policies. Sanders has a long history of bucking the establishment, is despised by many power-players within the party, is about as far-left as you find among major figures in U.S. politics, and has taken strong anti-interventionist positions against recent U.S. wars. They also have very different bases of support. Biden’s strongest support comes from voters over 65, while Sanders wins among the younger voters.
The Recent polling that shows Biden breaking away from the Sanders and the rest of the pack tend to oversample older voters. This was recently pointed out about a CNN poll by the Washington Times. While Biden has been doing very well in these skewed national polls, his numbers have been less impressive in some early primary states, according to FiveThirtyEight.com. That trend, however, was broken by a Monmouth poll that came out a few hours after FiveThrityEight’s analysis. This poll shows Biden taking a commanding lead in New Hampshire, the first primary state. Sanders won New Hampshire by 20 points in 2016 and must win it again in 2020 if he hopes to win the primary.
But a quick look into the polling data shows that, as seen in other polls, Biden’s lead may be padded by an oversampling of older voters. The image above places the Monmouth age breakdown side by side with the results of the 2016 primary in New Hampshire. The Monmouth poll is overwhelming made up of voters over 50 by a ratio of two to one. When compared to the voting results from the N.H. primary in 2016, it’s easy to see some major disparities. In 2016, 41% of voters were under 45. In the poll, only 33% of the respondents were below 50. So, despite using a bigger age range (18–50 instead of 18–45) a far lower percentage of younger voters were sampled. When looking at voters over 65, the poll literally doubled the percentage of that seen in the 2016 N.H. primary from 17% to 34%. This was the age range in which Biden performed the strongest, getting 53% of the vote compared to Sanders and Elizabeth Warren at 9% each.
If voters under 50 had been sampled at the same rates as the 2016 primary, Sanders’ numbers would have undoubtable gone up. Similarly, if 65+ voters were sampled at the 2016 primary rate, Biden’s numbers would have fallen significantly. This does not necessarily mean that Biden is not winning in New Hampshire right now, but it does mean that it is very unlikely that he is winning by anywhere near the margin shown in this poll. It is hard to prove that the media and polling organizations are doing this intentionally, but these shady numbers, and the reporting around this numbers, are creating a false narrative that Joe Biden is the clear frontrunner in this race.
