WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH) – President Trump is visiting Salina to rally for Senator Roger Marshall as part of a senate race that’s growing tighter.
A new poll released by the Washington Post on Friday shows that Marshall’s challenger, Adam Hamilton, is almost ten points ahead of Marshall. While most previous polls have shown the race to be close, the new one shows Hamilton clearly in the lead.
Some wonder if that’s the reason that Trump is visiting Kansas for a second time.
“If this poll was done correctly, these results are pretty startling,” said Professor Michael Smith, a political science professor at Emporia State University who’s involved with the annual Kansas Speaks survey.
With Hamilton leading Marshall 52% to 43%, that falls outside the margin of error. Smith explained the margin of error.
“Even if the sampling was done perfectly, there’s still a little wiggle room,” Smith said. “That’s what that margin of error is.”
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Smith said that polls shouldn’t be taken as an absolute indicator of how the election will go, and that in order to make these polls as accurate as possible, not all responses are treated as equal.
“You draw a sample and test the sample. And there’s nothing wrong with that, every farmer knows that. You can’t test all the soil on your farm,” Smith said. “And so, they’re sensitive to how well the sampling is done. Was it representative? Did we get enough Republicans, enough Democrats?”
In the article, the Washington Post admitted they didn’t get as many Republican voters as Democrat voters to complete the survey.
“The Republican responses should be given extra weight due to the fact that Republicans were under sampled,” Smith said.
He added that the poll should be compared to other polls to see if it’s an outlier.
When asked if President Trump’s decision to come to Kansas is motivated by this new poll, Smith said that’s likely not the case.
“If they made a decision based off of this, and not on their own internal polling, it would be an indication that they’re panicking,” Smith added.
Smith said that with these tight races, he wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t know all the final results on election night.
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