Bad Poll Writing

Please please please, take individual poll stories with all the skepticism you can muster. Take, for example, this new poll that breathlessly reports:

Hillary Clinton's lead over Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race has narrowed since late last week, according to the results of the first Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted since the Orlando shooting rampage on Sunday.

If you're a Clinton supporter, you're going "Holy crap." If you're behind Trump, you're cheering.If you're a journalist writing a poll story, you should know better.

Let's break it down. The difference is miniscule, from a 13-percentage-point lead to a 11.6-percentage-point lead. That's all of 1.4 percentage points. Well within a good poll's margin of error. Except they don't report a margin of error, they report something called:

The online poll included 1,063 likely voters and had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of about 3.5 percentage points.

What the hell is a credibility interval? The polling firm explains it here if you're interested, and a more skeptical look by AAPOR worth the read is here, but it boils down to the fact the sample in this poll is not random. That matters. It's an opt-in online poll. Now these are being used more and more often, and are not necessarily the evil they may seem to be. The 538 poll rankings gives IPSOS an "A-," which is damn good. But even if we accept the "credibility interval" as a surrogate for "margin of error" the results are still within that interval. In other words, there's no real difference between the two polls. That makes the hed and lede wrong.