Recent Oregon Polling

Some thoughts about a recent Oregon poll from Clout Research: They're wrong.

The demographics according to their poll:
Democrats = 40.5%
Republicans = 32.4%
Independent = 27.1%

But according to the Oregon SoS' June 2016 party registrations:
Democrats = 41.1%
Republicans = 29.7%
Independent (other) = 29.2%

Why would these differences matter?

In 2008 there was a very steep rise in Democratic registrations leading to an 11 point gap in registrations between Democrats and Republicans. As you may recall, Obama blew out McCain by 16 points.

A very similar thing is occurring in 2016. As of June, there is an 11 point gap between registered Democrats and Republicans, and while a chunk of that came from Bernie Sanders supporters who rushed to get into the Democratic Party to vote in the primary and will likely get out, the long-term trend has been the maintenance of a wide gap between registered Democrats and Republicans.

Clout Research's numbers are clearly biased against Democrats, understating the support of Democratic candidates in the state. (I can't break down the implied real numbers as they didn't break out crosstabs at the political party level.) If you don't believe me that Clout Research is biased towards Republicans, consider that 538 rates them a C- with a simple average error of 9.0 points out of 9 polls analyzed, calling just 33% of those races correctly.