Yesterday, a report of a Utah poll showing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leading the GOP’s Donald Trump by 1 point provoked speculation that the traditionally Republican state could flip in this bizarre election year.
The problem: That poll doesn’t seem to exist.
Salt Lake City CBS affiliate KUTV initially reported the poll on its website, with a 36-35 Clinton advantage over Trump. That article has since been amended to state that the numbers came from a June Hinckley Institute-Salt Lake Tribune poll conducted by Survey USA that does exist, and which actually showed the candidates tied at 35-35.
Yet the damage was already done. Several high-profile journalists tweeted the results as if they were new. Some have corrected the information:
HuffPost Pollster had an inkling that something was amiss when we couldn’t locate any other evidence of the poll. We require an actual poll release with accompanying methodological information before we put it into the Pollster database, and couldn’t find it. Then we saw that The Washington Post’s Philip Bump had discovered why:
The KUTV report indicates that Clinton gets 36 percent of support to 35 percent from Trump — leaving 29 percent of the electorate going somewhere else. This is actually quite similar to a SurveyUSA poll from June showing Clinton and Trump tied at 35 with Gary Johnson — whose campaign headquarters is in the state — pulling 13 percent. That leaves 17 percent of voters undecided…. The Salt Lake Tribune doesn’t have a story about a new poll at its website. The Hinckley Institute at the University of Utah doesn’t have any mention of it either. In an email to The Washington Post, the Tribune’s Dan Harrie confirmed that there in fact wasn’t a new survey from the paper. He speculated that KUTV was simply picking up a convention post-mortem the paper ran over the weekend — though there’s no reference to a 36-35 result.
The June poll still shows a surprising result ― both major party candidates tied at 35 percent. But that was nearly two months ago. We need a new poll or two in order to assess the state of the race in Utah now.
The moral of the story? Don’t ever believe or report a poll that doesn’t have a source. This election is crazy enough without spreading inaccurate data around.
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