You remember how in 2016, Establishment pollsters would over-sample Democrats to conclude that Hillary was “ahead” and “a lock to win”.
The charitable interpretation is cognitive dissonance: the Establishment simply couldn’t believe that Trump had real support, and accordingly, their pollsters adjusted-down his numbers. A cynic would go further, saying the Establishment pollsters were out to drag Hillary across the finish line by making her seem inevitable (depressing Republican voters).
Either way, Breitbart says they’re still at it.
…a Washington Post/ABC News poll show[s] Mr. Trump’s approval ratings languishing at 36 per cent…
The poll was performed by AbtAssociates…[whose] board members include former [staffers of] Bob Dole, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood, World Bank, and Deloitte…
WaPo/ABC polling obviously predicted the U.S. election incorrectly…
Since this time last year they have over-represented Democrat voters in their studies. For this latest one, 35 per cent of their respondents were Democrats, 23 per cent were Republicans, 35 per cent were Independents (who in turn lean towards voting Democrat)…
[other] demographic questions they asked are not included in the data…[except it’s clear that] Young cell phone users made up the dominant part of the poll, and cell phone-only households made up nearly half the interviews.
So, the poll was skewed to younger, trendy Democrats. Yet this same poll still shows the Democrats’ weak appeal:
…just 37 per cent of respondents think the Democrat Party “stands for something” while 52 per cent say they simply stand against Trump. WaPo buried this in paragraph 12 of 19 while CNN didn’t mention it at all.
Breitbart’s article goes on to quote the late Christopher Hitchens at length, about how polling is a racket and the power elite’s tool to manipulate public debate (for example, stigmatizing certain leaders or viewpoints as “unpopular”).
P.S. – Related vaguely: I don’t follow Bret Easton Ellis much but apparently, he and his boyfriend (who are hardly conservatives) are sick of Fake News and equally, sick of liberals who make no sense because they never get outside their bubble.
My dinner partner on Saturday said she had never heard that Comey admitted the NY Times had gotten a series of stories wrong. She thought I had made that up. When I told her the world isn’t this — gesturing around the dark opulence of The Sunset Tower — and that the divide is real, she dismissed it with Trump’s approval ratings without acknowledging the media’s approval ratings are lower than Trump’s. She pointed out that MSNBC was killing it in the ratings and I told her that Maddow and Hannity are basically neck-and-neck any given night–and yet I was thinking, ‘I don’t watch either one!’ So why am I even engaging in this?”
Only at a gay website would I read “Fun With Polls.”
And yet, new poll shows Donald Trump more popular than Hillary Clinton.
Good one. From that article:
That says it all. That he could blame the Russians for HER vast shortcomings, with a straight face (like some will believe it – and many more would wish to believe it), shows how far we’ve decayed as a nation.
They don’t call Peter of The Daou a Hillary superfanboy for nothing. She could kill someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, cackle about it, admit she did it, admit the victim deserved it, and he would still claim she was framed or forced to do it.
And people claim POTUS 45 has a sycophantic fan base…
If I could sponsor a law, it would simply be that no news organization can create, sponsor, or report a poll of any type, whatsoever.
The reasoning is simple:
1) It is entirely too easy to skew the results to say anything you like.
2) It is entirely too likely to cause a bandwagoning effect.
3) It isn’t news.
I think somebody’s beginning to get it.
Quoting from the passage of Bret Easton Ellis:
“When I told her the world isn’t this — gesturing around the dark opulence of The Sunset Tower — and that the divide is real, she dismissed it… ”
“…and I told her that Maddow and Hannity are basically neck-and-neck any given night–and yet I was thinking, ‘I don’t watch either one!’ So why am I even engaging in this?”