NBC removed polling documents that erroneously reported that President Joe Biden led former President Donald Trump in the race for the presidency.
NBC data guru Steve Kornacki discussed the results in a Sunday morning post on X, noting that its planned release on “Meet the Press” would not take place due to the attempted assassination of Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.
Kornacki reported that Trump led Biden by 2% in a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Biden, linking to the original documents in a follow-up post, but the documents mistakenly showed Biden leading by 3% in a six-way race.
The network issued a correction Sunday evening, according to Politico, deleting the documents from Document Cloud, citing “an error with the original polling documents.” The corrected network’s online article accurately reported Trump led Biden by 3% in a six-way race that included Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West.
Public Opinion Strategies issued a statement about the error in a Sunday evening post on X.
“The polling team extends its apology to @NBCNews and to all those who reviewed the filled in questionnaire of our most recent survey,” the polling firm said. “We made an important mistake on the filled in released today. On the multi-candidate ballot (Q8, corrected here) we flipped the numbers. President Biden is not ahead with 40% to 37% for former President Trump. In fact, Trump is ahead 40% to 37%.”
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“The correct data is reflected in the crosstabs and slides, but unfortunately these numbers were flipped in the topline document that the polling firms prepared for public release for NBC,” the statement continued. “We take full responsibility for a very significant error on our part. Deep apologies.”
Trump leads Biden by 2.7% in a national head-to-head matchup, according to the RealClearPolling average of polls, with the lead expanding to 4.1% when West, Kennedy and Stein are included in the surveys.
NBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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