A few more thoughts on the Fox News poll, which has traditionally been quite a good poll. 1/ https://twitter.com/psephologist/status/1248406662639054848

Last October, Trump got ticked off about a Fox News poll, and Bill Barr headed over to Murdochland to rattle their cage. @maggieNYT had the story: 2/ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-impeachment.html

A day later, Shep Smith was out as the chief anchor on the hard news side at Fox. 3/ https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/media/shepard-smith-leaving-fox-news/index.html

I was curious at the time whether this was also the death knell for independence at the Fox News poll, but generally it's remained quite good. Yesterday's is the first time I can remember shaking my head. 4/

They're pretty transparent, and even provide a useful guide to margin of sampling error for the subgroups they're showing in their tabs. And they report stuff like this trendline on the partisan makeup of their sample 5/

You'll notice a few things there, starting with the fact that over their previous 11 polls, partisanship averaged D+7, and yesterday is the first time in that stretch they've had things closer than D+5 6/

There are bigger debates over whether / how much to let partisanship float in your sample, and easy / innocent explanations for why an unweighted survey might show D+9 one week and D+0 the next 7/

It's mostly a case of caveat emptor -- don't breathlessly report big movement in the vote when what a survey really shows is big movement in who they interviewed 8/

It's something to keep an eye on going forward. Fox News poll has traditionally been very good but Trump/Barr haven't been shy about putting the arm on them and as the election gets closer there will be more be pressure to put a thumb on the scale. /fin