Let’s look closer at the CNN poll. The poll was commissioned by CNN but was
conducted by SSRS, “an independent research company.” It wasn’t actually Don Lemon and Jim Acosta on the street corner asking passersby who they favored in the 2020 presidential election.
The poll sample is important. Oversampling Democrats will skew the results in favor of the Democrat candidate. In this poll, 34 percent identified as Democrat while only 26 percent described themselves as Republican, an eight-point difference. Imagine the results if those percentages were flipped.
They also surveyed registered, not likely, voters. Given that only slightly more than half of eligible voters
actually voted in the 2016 presidential election, this too is not a representative sample.
Polls are designed to reflect the opinions of a group of people at a moment in time. A small sample of individuals is asked for its opinion regarding a particular issue, and hopefully this small sample is representative of the larger population.
www.rasmussenreports.com