Dishonest, misleading and inaccurate polls


The American people seem especially susceptible to "bandwagon" propaganda:  They tend to support any idea that the majority favors, because they are reluctant to swim against the current and question the orthodoxy.  The orthodoxy is whatever the television declares more than once.  As a result, fresh polling information can be formed into a series of self-fulfilling pronouncements.

By and large, the news media in America, and I suppose all over the world, are demonstrably biased toward the political left.  One form of bias is the uncritical presentation of polls.  There are trustworthy polling organizations which are very careful to gather and present their findings in a statistically sound manner that leaves little doubt about the polls' accuracy.  Gallup and Rasmussen come to mind immediately, although there must be others.  Unfortunately, the news media seem to present polling results from almost anybody, and in some cases the polls are thinly-disguised propaganda.

That wouldn't be a problem, except that millions of poorly-educated Americans tend to watch television without questioning anything the television says.  If the television talking head says something, it must be true -- at least until tomorrow when the "facts" may be controverted.  This is due in part to the use of television in classrooms, where every idea the TV screen emits is to be taken as factual instruction.

Appended 10/29/2018:
One TV station with which I am familiar has now replaced the term "Margin of Error" with "Credibility."  But credibility and accuracy are two different things.  I don't know if this is a nationwide trend or if it is confined to one station; but frankly, that station is not known for original ideas.

After the big Schiff show finale, public support craters for impeachment -poll.  Not too long ago, the press was calling President Trump a goner.  Remember this early October Fox News poll that shocked so many people?  They had it that a majority of randomly selected registered voters, 50% to 41%, were all in for impeaching and removing President Trump.  We had our doubts, but the press reported that as perfectly representative of public opinion, undoubtedly a lit fuse to the eventual ouster of President Trump. [...] So now we've got the impeachment needle moving decisively to the other side.  Not only did the needle not move the way Noonan forecast it might move, but it moved in exactly the opposite direction.  What happened?

Nolte: Massive Media Fail As Poll Of Polls Prove Trump's More Popular Than Obama.  Real Clear Politics, a non-partisan (and indispensable) site that tracks countless polls and averages them, also tracks the job approval numbers for President Trump and former (thank heaven) President Obama in a way that allows us to see how the two presidents compare on this same day during their respective presidencies. [...] We are now entering our fourth year of a media jihad against Trump, a hate campaign unlike any other in modern history.  Literally, billions and billions and billions of corporate dollars are being spent by every corner of the establishment media to destroy one man, this one man:  Trump.  The "Very Fine People" Hoax, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the Fish Food Hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh-Rapist Hoax, the Kurds Are Being Exterminated Hoax — I'm forgetting a hundred more — and now we have this laughable Impeachment Hoax.  Compare that to Barry Obama, a man this same media spent billions and billions and billions of corporate dollars to shield, to protect, to assure and reassure the public of his unique magnificence, competence, and holiness.

Polls: Endless Pursuit of Impeachment Spells Trouble for Democrats.  The Democrats' desperate pursuit of impeachment is driving key voters away — a sign of danger for Democrats going into 2020 — polling reveals.  Polls, in recent days, have indicated that the general public is growing weary of House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff's (D-CA) endless pursuit of impeachment, with survey after survey showing opposition to impeachment growing and support falling.  The results, however, are exacerbated when key voters, such as independents, are isolated.

The myth of Mayor Pete.  What is it about Mayor Pete Buttigieg that's going to most appeal to the people of Atlanta?  Is it the years he spent in consultancy on the McKinsey payroll?  Perhaps it's the large donations he's secured from a few Silicon Valley donors — because we know how much the new left loves billionaires. [...] The mayor's recent rise can be attributed to a few factors.  There is that tech money, which he's been pouring into early primary state TV advertising.  This in turn leads to an outsized performance in the polls there — it's one of the areas where money really talks.  Just ask Tom Steyer.  A St Anselm poll released Tuesday [11/19/2019] shows him with a 10-point lead over Biden and Warren in New Hampshire.  Never mind that it only surveyed 255 people and has a 6.1 percent margin of error — it's the headlines that count.

Bloomberg leads Trump by 6 points in 2020 election matchup.  Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg leads President Donald Trump by 6 percentage points in a hypothetical 2020 matchup, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico poll.  Forty-three percent of likely voters would back Bloomberg if the election were held today [11/10/2019], compared to 37% who would vote for Trump.  Twenty-one percent those polled, however, said they don't know or don't have an opinion.  The poll comes as Bloomberg considers jumping into the Democratic presidential primary.  The billionaire is still not sure if he'll enter the race, a source told CNBC, but he is troubled by what he sees in the Democratic field.

Another poll on the same day shows something entirely different:
Michael Bloomberg [is] more disliked than any Democratic candidate: poll.  Michael Bloomberg would face a tough start to his presidential bid — as a new poll Sunday [11/10/2019] has found him with little support and nearly a quarter of Democratic primary voters who dislike him.  Despite grabbing wall-to-wall press coverage over the past week since hints of his possible run surfaced, Bloomberg came out as the favorite candidate for just 4-percent of Democratic primary voters, according to the Morning Consult poll.  It puts the former New York mayor in sixth place, just behind Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg and clearly trailing Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 18- and 20-percent support respectively.

Lefty Pundits to Democratic Presidential Field: 'You're Losers!'.  Over on the far left, New York magazine's Jonathan Chait writes that the latest battleground states poll shows that Democrats are living "in a fantasy world."  [...] As Chait is forced to conclude, "if you've been relying on national polls for your picture of the race, you're probably living in la-la land."

We're Stuck in the Middle of a Grand Illusion.  A lot of polling out there today, folks, a lot of misleading, misrepresentative polling.  It's stunning how we continue to be stuck in the middle of a grand illusion. [...] The Mueller report shows no collusion, no obstruction, and yet they continue as though it does.  Now, there's a very interesting reason why this is the case.  I'm gonna illustrate here in a minute.  They believe that there is no such thing as public opinion.  I'm telling you right now they think public opinion doesn't matter.  Public opinion is what their published polls say it is.  That's a big difference, folks.  It is a huge difference.  There is no public opinion.

Do These Numbers Tell Us More Than the Polls?  One of the casualties of the Democrats war on free speech is political polls.  Polls have become useless because Republicans no longer feel safe replying to a pollster, even on on-line.  Polls are purposely skewed, often by the blatant expedient of polling more Democrats, as was done in the recent Fox impeachment poll.  So, we are reduced to anecdotal evidence about where public opinion is trending.  We often hear of the culture war victories of America's new Marxist left, because they fully control our propaganda press.  Are they really winning public opinion, or is that, too, propaganda meant to discourage conservatives and suppress our vote?  Beyond the headlines, things do not look so rosy for the woke left.

Pew Pushes Polling Propaganda.  Pollsters are at it again, pushing sketchy polls, not to reflect public opinion, but to shape it.  This is called propaganda, a popular tool for dictators who want to control the information flow from an all-powerful government to their subjects, the people.  What once passed for journalism is now mostly propaganda, an effort by major media organizations to insert themselves into the political process, to push their agenda, even if it means throwing any pretense of journalistic principle and integrity to the wind.

Impeachment Becomes A Psychodrama Of the Press.  Fox News, which is generally well-disposed to the president, published a poll last week that 51% of Americans believe the president should be impeached and removed from office.  Fox's polls aren't very accurate, though their news coverage and comment are quite professional.  But this one is bunk.  Between 40% and 50% of Americans may wish there were a reason to remove Mr. Trump, or hope that he won't be reelected.  That figure is insufficient to change congressional votes on an impeachment resolution, given that about 45% of the country is militantly pro-Trump and probably 10 million others will hold their noses and vote for his substantive performance despite his stylistic foibles.

Fox News Impeachment Poll Underrepresented Republicans.  If the Fox News poll had been weighted to accurately reflect party affiliation in the United States, it would have found 44.9 percent favoring impeachment, and 44.4 percent opposing, according to analysis from the New York Post.  That's still a plurality, which is arguably not great for Trump, but it's not as significant as a majority.  Many outlets jumped on the Fox News poll as proof that things look dire for Trump.  But this poll really shows not much has changed.  In May of 2017, a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that 43 percent of voters wanted Congress to begin impeachment proceedings.  That was just a few short months after Trump took office.  Despite three years of an anti-Trump media scandalizing everything, there really hasn't been huge movement of the needle on impeachment.

Fox News is Joining the Fake News Pollsters.  [Scroll down]  As the impeachment scheme falls apart, with no actual wrongdoing by the President, no bribes or extortion, no pay-to-play, no collusion, or anything else which Trump is accused of, but which Joe Biden actually did, the media has gone into overdrive to push the "everyone hates Trump and wants him thrown from office" mantra.  Who needs high crimes or misdemeanors if a majority of America wants Trump removed from office?  Impeachment by opinion poll.  Impeachment is being boosted and promoted by the usual Democrat media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, the NY Times, and the Washington Post, but Fox News, so-called "fair and balanced," has been considered more reasoned than the rest of the Trump-loathing media.  At least until Rupert Murdoch's two sons got more involved in the news business, tilting Fox News leftward.

New York Post:  Fox News 'Misrepresented' Impeachment Poll.  The New York Post released an analysis Saturday [10/12/2019], which found Fox News had "mispresented" their poll, suggesting a majority of Americans supported impeachment of President Donald Trump.  Fox News released a poll this week which found that 51 percent of registered voters want President Trump impeached and removed from office, while 4 percent want Trump impeached but want him to stay in office, and 40 percent of voters oppose impeachment.  The Fox News poll found that supposedly showed a double-digit increase in the number of voters who wanted Trump impeached and removed from office.

Fox News pollster Braun Research misrepresented impeachment poll: analysis.  The poll released last week by Fox News that claimed most Americans favor the impeachment of President Trump underrepresented Republican and independent voters, The [New York] Post has found.  The poll said 51% of voters were in favor of Trump's impeachment and removal from office, while 40% did not want him impeached.  Princeton, New Jersey, pollster Braun Research, which conducted the survey, noted 48% of its respondents were Democrats.  But the actual breakdown of party-affiliation is 31% Democrat, 29% Republican and 38% independent, according to Gallup.

About that Fox News poll claiming 51% of voters want Trump out.  [Scroll down]  It's undoubtedly a lot of randomly selected registered voters, even if it's not 51%, and that's likely a reflection of the wall-to-wall negative media coverage President Trump has gotten over this impeachment whistleblower issue, which I've seen on television news broadcasts. [...] The bad thing with this is that it will embolden Democrats to keep pressing forward to remove President Trump from office, even on just obstruction grounds since they aren't doing any "impeachment inquiry" honestly or fairly to all sides.  They've gagged Republicans from asking questions, and their refusal to hold a real impeachment inquiry is nothing more than a bid to keep subpoena powers from Republicans.  Is any of that known to voters?  Not most Fox poll voters.  Worse still, the Drudge Report, for inexplicable reasons, is featuring almost exclusively negative Trump news these days, along with the NeverTrumps at Fox News.

What makes Fox News's 'Trump impeachment' poll totally unrealiable.  Polling in modern America has degenerated into a vehicle to create news and headlines and to shape public opinion on an issue or an individual.  Over the past few days, the lead on every cable news channel and the headline in virtually all newspapers is Fox News claiming in its exclusive poll that 51% of Americans now favor impeachment and removal of President Trump.  How did the Fox polling unit come up with this number?  The Fox news polling companies interviewed 1,003 registered voters, ostensibly throughout the length and breadth of the United States.  Many polling companies use either all adult Americans (254 million) or registered voters (158 million in 2016) as their universe for polling.  Obviously, the greater the number of potential people to contact and question, the easier a poll is to complete and to skew a result.  In reality, what matters is who votes in an election.

NPR Poll:  More Americans Trust Trump Administration Than Congress, The Media.  A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll released Thursday [10/10/2019] shows that more Americans trust the Trump administration than the media and Congress as a whole.  "The poll of 1,123 Americans was conducted with live telephone Oct. 3 through Oct. 8, 2019," according to NPR and asked a series of questions related to President Donald J. Trump's presidency.  When asked, "How much do you trust Congress:  A great deal, a good amount, not very much, not at all?"  66 percent of Americans said they trust Congress "not very much/not at all."  31 percent said they trusted Congress a "great deal/a good amount."  When asked the same question regarding trust about the media, 69 percent said they trusted our news "not very much/not at all."  29 percent of Americans said they trusted the media.

Poll Shows Partisan Animosity Has Deepened Since 2016.  A 64% majority of Republican respondents felt that Democrats are more closed-minded than other Americans.  Sixty-three percent said Democrats are unpatriotic, and 55% said they are immoral.  Small numbers of Republicans said Democrats are lazy and unintelligent — 46% and 36%, respectively.  On the other side, 75% of Democratic respondents said that Republicans are closed-minded.  Forty-seven percent said members of the GOP are immoral, 38% said Republicans are unintelligent, 23% said they are unpatriotic, and 20% said they are lazy.

Andy McCarthy on impeachment push:  It's a political process 'masquerading' as a legal one.  The impeachment inquiry is a "political process kind of masquerading as a legal one," former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy said Thursday [10/10/2019].  According to a Fox News Poll released Wednesday, just over half of voters want President Trump impeached and removed from office.  A new high of 51 percent wants Trump impeached and removed from office, another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed, and 40 percent oppose impeachment altogether.  In July, 42 percent favored impeachment and removal, while five percent said impeach but don't remove him, and 45 percent opposed impeachment.

Independent voters now favor Trump over Democratic front-runners:  Poll.  Independent voters are warming up to President Trump, says a new survey which finds that Mr. Trump is now besting Democratic front-runners in a theoretical matchup.  "A new IBD-TIPP poll shows President Trump has gained significant ground with independent voters in head-to-head matchups with the Democrat Party frontrunners for president," wrote Matt Margolis, a contributor to PJ Media.  He cited the factors.  Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, for instance, leads Mr. Trump by just one percentage point among independents, down from Mr. Biden's 18 percentage point lead in September.  Against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 49% of independents backed Mr. Trump, while 43% favored the Massachusetts Democrat.

Trump Invades the Democratic Party.  President Trump's path to reelection goes through the Democratic Party.  Goal No. 1 is to get Democrats to eliminate his greatest threat:  Joe Biden. [...] The general election polls are what keep him up at night.  They show the former vice president beating Trump like a drum.  The most recent national Fox News poll puts Biden ahead of Trump by 14 points.  The ABC News/Washington Post poll gives him a 15-point lead.

The Editor says...
President Trump will almost certainly be re-elected.  There is no question that he can beat any candidate announced thus far.  In my opinion, the polls cited in this article are in error.

A deeper dive into one poll shows what Americans really think about impeachment.  The latest CBS News poll headlined the findings that "Majority of Americans favor an impeachment inquiry into President Trump," 55 percent to 45 percent.  But what if there's more than meets the eye?  Like many polls, there is plenty of fodder within the CBS News poll results to support either side.  The trick is who does the reporting and which points they select to highlight.  What if it turns out there are many other headlines — and statistics — that could have been chosen from the same poll, ones that give an entirely different take on the situation?  Here's one of them:  "Majority of Americans in Democrat-heavy poll favor an impeachment inquiry into President Trump."  Wouldn't most Americans looking for unbiased information want the context that the poll interviewed more Democrats than Republicans?

Presidential Polling Propaganda.  According to the latest presidential opinion polls, the 2020 presidential election is over.  Newsweek is giddy, reporting several days ago, "The latest Fox News poll about the 2020 election shows President Donald Trump losing to every Democratic frontrunner including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren."  Propaganda, used extensively in the past by communists and Nazis, is information put out by governments, or their media allies, to push an agenda and influence people rather than to inform them. [...] The Fox News poll noted above was not actually conducted by Fox, but instead commissioned to Beacon Research and Shaw and Company Research.  Calling it a "Fox News Poll" is part of the propaganda, meaning that if Trump's favorite news network thinks his electoral prospects are nil, then it must be really bad for Trump and his supporters.

Florida Poll:  Trump Narrowly Leads Top Democrat Candidates in General Election Matchup.  A Florida Atlantic University poll released Wednesday [9/18/2019] shows President Trump narrowly leading his potential Democrat challengers in a hypothetical 2020 general election matchup.  The poll — conducted September 12-15 among 934 registered voters in Florida — showed the president narrowly leading his top Democrat challengers in a general election matchup in the Sunshine State.

The Editor says...
Depending on the sample, the race might be closer in Florida, especially south of 29° North, than elsewhere in the country; however, I doubt if the leading Democrat candidate (whoever it is next year) has a serious chance of defeating President Trump.

Why Polls Now?  Why are we so beset with polls so long before an election?  An election whose candidates are still unknown?  Just to be clear, these are not opinion polls, nor election polls; they are variants of push polls.  These polls are used not to reflect public opinion, but to try to shape opinion or grow an audience.

Fake News, Fake Polls — CNN Edition.  It's been a tough few weeks for CNN.  Who knew pushing fake news could be so challenging? [...] CNN's story of the week is, "6 in 10 say Trump does not deserve a second term."  Well, that settles it.  If CNN says so, it must be true.

Dana Loesch Explains How Media Manipulates Polling On Firearms.  Gun expert Dana Loesch dissected a new ABC News/Washington Post poll on gun control on Monday [9/9/2019] and explained why polling on the issue is oftentimes misleading. [...] Loesch began by highlighting problems with the following question that was asked:  "Would you support or oppose a nationwide ban on high-capacity ammunition clips, meaning those containing more than 10 bullets?"  "This is one question," Loesch tweeted.  "First of all, the terminology is incorrect (this matters for a couple reasons) and who determined over 10 rounds means 'high-capacity?'  In some, that isn't even standard, it's below standard."

North Carolina Special Election Poll:  McCready Lead Oversampled Democrats.  A poll released on Friday [8/30/2019] that shows Democrat Dan McCready leading Republican Dan Bishop by four points in the September 10 special election in North Carolina's Ninth Congressional District apparently oversampled Democrats.

Americans Feel Better About Race Relations, And Other Trump Poll Results The Press Doesn't Want You To Know About.  How do you cover a poll that shows satisfaction with the economy, despite all the harrumphing about an impending recession, is much higher than it ever was under President Barack Obama?  Or reveals that views on race relations are actually better today than three years ago?  Or shows that most think the political system is being shaken up in a good way?  Answer:  You don't.  That is, if you'rea mainstream media outlet and the poll is your own.

Have Pollsters Learned Nothing since the Last Election?  While the moniker "fake news" is typically reserved for cable news and some of the more prominent newspapers in America, the term could also be applied to presidential polls.  How many pollsters predicted Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election by a landslide up to and including the day of the actual election?  The "paper of record," the New York Times, told readers on election day, Nov. 8, 2016, that Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent chance of winning the election.

Joe Biden won't win.  Joe Biden has led Democratic polls since day one, holding the kind of consistent lead within his party that Donald Trump held heading into the 2016 primaries.  The numbers say he will be the nominee.  They also say he will beat Trump.  They're wrong:  you should still bet against Biden getting the nomination or getting into the White House.

Volatile presidential polls spark new round of anxieties.  Trying to figure out the state of the Democratic presidential race?  Get in line.  Public opinion surveys have varied by the day, particularly in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where some candidates can point to individual polls to argue they are building momentum.  Former Vice President Joe Biden has held a relatively steady lead in national polls, though an Economist-YouGov poll this week found him holding just a 1 point lead over Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Dems Rely on Phony Impeachment Polling.  [Scroll down]  In the Fox News poll, those surveyed were 46 percent Democrat and only 40 percent Republican, a 6 point Democrat oversampling. [...] Interestingly, when asked if Trump should be impeached but not removed from office, only 9 percent favor this approach while 77 percent believe he should not be impeached at all.  This is quite a disconnect suggesting that those surveyed may not understand the Constitutional process for impeachment and conviction.  How many low information voters believe that if Trump is impeached, Hillary Clinton automatically becomes president?

President Trump Slams Fox News As New Poll Shows Biden Up 10 Points On Trump!  Some things just don't smell right.  They don't pass the "smell test".  In other words, they're so fishy that your common sense just tells you they can't possibly be right.  And that's the case with the latest Fox News poll claiming that Sleepy Joe Biden has a 10 point lead on President Donald J. Trump.

After 2016, pollsters have no clue what'll happen in 2020 — but bookies do.  When you want to know who's going to win the next presidential election, don't read the mainstream newspapers or tune in to the cable networks.  And forget the pollsters — they don't know diddly.  Just check in with the bookies.  "Donald Trump is still favored to win the 2020 Election with -120 average odds," Sports Betting Dime wrote last week.  That means you'd have to bet $120 just to win $100.  Them's some pretty good odds that Trump'll repeat.

Democrat Internal Poll of Swing Voters Is Leaked and the Results Are Brutal.  Some Democrat strategist is going to wake up in a cold sweat later tonight after seeing this.  The Democratic Party conducted an internal poll of swing voters, including their feelings on the "squad" and socialism.  The result are absolutely brutal when juxtaposed with the stated positions of those running in the 2020 Democratic primary race.  The poll was leaked to Axios and here are some of the results. [...]

Poll: Megan Rapinoe Beats Trump in Hypothetical Presidential Race.  A recent poll from Public Policy Polling, showed U.S. Women's National Team (USWNT) co-captain Megan Rapinoe defeating President Trump in a hypothetical 2020 presidential matchup.

The Editor says...
Being a troublemaker is never a resumé enhancement, except in politics.

Poll Shocker:  Trump Ties With 'Unnamed Socialist'.  The headline out of the recent Washington Post/ABC News poll was that President Trump's approval ratings had hit an all-time high. [...] If it weren't for the relentlessly negative coverage he gets in the press or the constant attacks by politicians, pundits and celebrities, Trump's approval number would probably be 10 points higher.

The deciding factor in the 2020 presidential campaign will be surprisingly simple.  While a majority of Americans tell pollsters they definitely will not vote to extend Trump's White House lease for a second term, a majority also say they believe he will be reelected.  How does that work?

Wishful thinking on the part of ABC News:
Trump reaches career-high approval, yet faces a range of re-election risks:  Poll.  Bolstered by a strong economy, Donald Trump reached the highest job approval rating of his career in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll and runs competitively for re-election against four of five possible Democratic contenders.  Yet he remains broadly unpopular across personal and professional measures, marking his vulnerabilities in the 2020 election.

Who Really Believes Biden Can Beat Trump?  According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, however, if the 2020 election were held today, Biden would beat President Trump by 10 points.  If this inspires skepticism, it won't be ameliorated by the finding in the same survey that Trump's approval rating is at the highest point of his presidency.  The new poll found that 47 percent of registered voters say they approve of Trump compared to 42 percent in April.  Meanwhile, Biden's lead among the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination is dwindling.

The Polls Show Trump Lagging Behind Biden And Everyone Else, But The Betting Market Tells A Whole Other Story.  Polls mean nothing, and we all know then-candidate Donald Trump was down big-time in almost every one back in 2016 for, well, pretty much the entire cycle until the actual election results proved the polls to be a giant sack of you know what. [...] Even so, wouldn't it be great to hear a little good news?  Well, I've got some - not from polls, but from political betting aggregator website  The site, which uses millions of betting dollars worldwide to provide market trends, also specializes in U.S. politics and who wagerers think will win at any given time.  Political betting is currently illegal in the U.S., but is alive and well in other markets.  In fact, predicted via press release Tuesday [6/25/2019] that over $100 million will be spent in the 2020 race, "making it the biggest non-sports betting event of all time."

Biden's Mythical Mass of Support.  Something very strange is going on with our news media, as it covers the state of the 2020 campaign.  Donald Trump, according to the big news outlets (CNN, the New York Times, ABC, the Washington Post, and their brethren), is on the ropes.  The polls from these same news outlets show him losing by catastrophic margins to virtually every Democratic candidate.  Even Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is polling at 2 percent among Democrats, would defeat Trump in every key state.  Joe Biden — according to the polls and the pundits — would crush Trump even in the reddest of the red states.  Forget the Midwest — Biden is so wildly popular, even Texas is now out of reach for the GOP.  Quinnipiac says Biden will squash Trump like a bug in Florida — 50 percent to 41 percent.  In fact, another Quinnipiac poll reports a tsunami of Bidenophilia is sweeping the nation from coast to coast.  "Joe Biden is ahead by landslide proportions," says Quinnipiac.

The Editor says...
The news media thrive on neck-and-neck horse races, where the lead changes every hour, depending on who's speaking.  An impending landslide doesn't compel you to tune in every day to learn the latest details.  Sensationalism sells advertising.

MainStream Media continues to be duped by anti-Trump pollsters.  With headlines, the mainstream media is able to direct the national narrative.  Headlines told us that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016.  They told us Donald Trump would never, ever win.

Trump and the Latest Polls:  Summertime Blues or More Fake News?  Recent polls show President Donald Trump in big trouble, likely to lose in a landslide to many of the 20-plus Democrat contenders.  Once again, the media tell their dwindling audience how "the walls are closing in" on Trump and how no one likes him.  Should Trump-supporters be worried?  Or is this just the latest edition of the Fake News Gazette, courtesy of the Trump-loathing media?

Trump's 'Orlando Poll' Makes Stale Bread Out of Of Fox Poll.  Some 20,000 patriots cheered the president on at the packed-house Amway Center [6/18/2019]. [...] The Fox News poll, released within a few days before Trump's official re-election launch, and which may have intended to leave the masses reeling in shock with the 'news' that Trump was trailing behind Democrat primary contender Joe Biden and raving socialist Senator Bernie Sanders by 10 and 9 points respectively, is looking pretty stale after Orlando.

Art of the Hype: [the] Media's early-poll fascination [is] about ratings, revenue, not sound reporting.  It's campaign season and the Democrats are scrambling for traction, so guess what, America — make way for the weekly, daily, hourly horse race of polls.  That, and the accompanying snarky pundit swipes at this current president.  And not just any polls.  Polls specifically showing Democrats, the favored class of mainstream media types everywhere, are firmly in the lead.  Let the eye-rolling begin.  Let's not pretend for even a moment these surveys mean anything.

Fake Polls Are Back Again.  Since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump has masterfully labeled the media as "fake news" for their ongoing liberal bias and censorship of conservatives.  One method the "fake news" media uses to ridicule President Trump is to champion supposedly independent polls that show his low approval rating.  The latest tactic is to promote polls that indicate the President will lose in a "landslide" to former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.  This week several new polls were heavily hyped by the Trump-hating media.  A new Quinnipiac University poll boasts nothing but good news for the top Democratic presidential contenders.  In individual matchups against President Trump, all of them are leading.

Survey: 56% of Americans think Arabic numerals shouldn't be taught in schools.  A Pittsburgh-based polling company is making waves after its CEO tweeted the results for a survey question that showed 56% of Americans believe Arabic numerals shouldn't be taught in schools.  Civic Science CEO John Dick tweeted a screengrab of results for a question included in the poll, which revealed that only 29% of Americans believe Arabic numerals should be taught to children.

The Editor says...
This poll is obviously an attempt to prove (or provoke) anti-Arabic prejudice.

Australian Politics, Upside-Down.  The Liberal/National Party's election victory in Australia on May 18 was the latest electoral result to shock the punditry.  Like Brexit and Donald Trump, it was a conservative victory that few expected.  Voters in Queensland, Australia's agricultural and industrial power center, turned to the LNP in support of the proposed Carmichael coal mine that would provide up to 5,000 jobs to the local economy — but which the Labor Party and Green Party opposed.  Labor's supposedly unlosable "climate change election" proved a debacle, as exit polls predicting that the party would gain up to 18 seats turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

How did the federal election polls get it so wrong?  [Scroll down]  Tasmanian electoral analyst Kevin Bonham also described the events as a "massive polling failure", writing that it was looking like a "mirror image of the expected result".  As of Sunday [5/19/2019], he told SBS News that there seemed to be a three percent error across every poll in the past two weeks, which is far outside the usual margin for error.  "It's like one poll can be three percent out and that's what you would sort of expect now and then by random chance.  But all the polls being out by that amount in the same direction and getting all the same results is something that absolutely cannot happen by random chance," he said.

Wrong polls blindsided nation, but 'Shorten knew all along'.  As Scott Morrison charged to victory yesterday, seemingly defying all odds, Australians were left scratching their heads about how the polls could have got it so wrong.  In the past two years leading up to last night's election, the Coalition did not win a single Newspoll.

Conservatives Win Shock Victory in Australia, NYT Laments Climate Alarmist Los.  On Saturday [5/18/2019], the conservative party — the Liberal/National coalition — held on to its majority in Australia's parliament, even picking up a few seats and stunning observers who had predicted a Labor Party victory.  In fact, The New York Times ran a lament that the climate alarmists lost their election. [...] Prime Minister Scott Morrison called his coalition's victry a "miracle," since polls had predicted a Labor victory.

What the Dems Can Learn From Down Under.  You may have, for various social reasons, told some pollster that the "Save the Earth" party has your support.  But it's a lot easier to focus on the environment if one can count on a steady income.  Consequently, in the end, you'll vote for the "Paycheck Party."  This shouldn't require enormous prescience to predict, yet it consistently surprises the pollsters.  The latest election in which they managed to miss the blindingly obvious just took place Down Under between the Labor Party and the conservative Liberal-National coalition.

Australia votes 2019: Shock!  Climate action bombs.  Pollsters crash.  Skeptics Win.  Against all the polls, the money, advertising, and the non-stop media coverage, against all expectations and the betting agencies — the Extreme Climate Fix was a flop.  The Labor Plan to cut Australian emissions by 45% percent [sic] is now gone — per capita this would have been a world record sacrifice in a country already increasing their renewable energy faster than any other.  Major betting agency Sportsbet were so sure Labor would win they paid out $1.3 million on bets two days early. [...] If Labor had won, they would be crowing right now about how it proved the people wanted action. [...] Labor was tipped to win decisively in every poll.  Even in the exit polls.  So thousands of people told pollsters one thing, then they voted the other way, and hid that again on the way out the polling door.  This was not just the abject failure of climate change as a vote winner, it was also a crashing fail for the pollsters.

Conservatives Win in Australia ("Unexpectedly!").  Another national election where polls favored the left-wing party but the right-wing party won, this time in Australia. [...] How badly were the polls off?  "The polls — 56 consecutive weeks of them — pointed to a win for Labor and Bill Shorten."

Inconvenient Truths, Inconvenient Outcomes.  The Liberal Australian government pulls out a surprise win Down Under! [...] I understand that Labor teamed up with the Green Weenie contingent and made global warming their main focus.  All the polls predicting Labor's win might suggests that there was a whole lot of virtue signaling going on for benefit of the pollsters but the peeps just aren't really buying it.

Australia's conservative coalition scores stunning political victory in general election, defies polls forecasting loss.  Australia's ruling conservative coalition defied polls and scored a stunning political victory in the country's general election on Saturday, with the main opposition party officially conceding the defeat.  Opposition leader Bill Shorten called Prime Minister Scott Morrison to congratulate him on the election victory.  He told Labor party supporters that his party didn't win enough seats to form a coalition government.

Democratic social media poll finds more users want Supreme Court justices like Kavanaugh than Ginsburg.  A Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Twitter poll asking what type of Supreme Court justices social media users would like to have on the bench apparently backfired when 71 percent of respondents selected "justices like Brett Kavanaugh" compared to just 29 percent who chose "justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg."  The poll, which is not scientific and open to anyone with a Twitter account, was posted on May 3 and stated it had two more days before it closed.  However, by Sunday afternoon [5/5/2019], the tweet had vanished.

New York Times claims nearly half of students are 'going hungry' by citing survey with 6 percent response rate.  It's no secret among academic researchers that journalists frequently mischaracterize their research, likely because the journalists don't understand it.  Perhaps the most misreported statistic in higher ed, the 1-in-5 campus-rape figure, has been explicitly disavowed by the researcher who led the study.  But sometimes reporters and their editors just want a better headline than the research can deliver.

Why Those Biden/Trump Polls Are Meaningless.  [A Drudge Report] headline links to a Morning Consult story that found Biden with a 42 percent to 34 percent lead over President Trump in a hypothetical matchup.  "Along with his advantage over Trump, Biden has held a consistent lead in Morning Consult's weekly tracking among likely Democratic primary voters," the report says.  But the only thing shocking about this poll is that anyone would put any stock in such polls so early in the race.  Just ask President John Glenn.  In May 1983, a Gallup poll came out showing that then-Sen. John Glenn would do better in a matchup against President Reagan, with a far wider margin than the Biden/Trump split.  As the New York Times reported on May 19 of that year, the survey "found that Senator Glenn led Mr. Reagan 54 percent to 37 percent."

The end of polls?  Like everything the internet touches, and not always for the better, polling seems to be going the way of the buggy whip. [...] That's likely to have implications for coming elections if there is no such thing as reliable polls anymore.  And it's a great shame for reputable polling companies such as Pew Research, which often brings to light interesting and unexpected information to the public fore based on its thorough polling.

Biden the Democrats' sole hope to beat Trump in 2020, says Iowa poll.  Former Vice President Joe Biden is the only potential presidential candidate who could beat President Trump in next year's general election, according to a new poll of Iowa voters.  In a direct match-up with Trump, Biden would prevail in 2020 with 51 percent of the vote to the president's 49 percent, Emerson College found in a survey released on Saturday.  Other contenders eyeing the Democratic nomination, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as well as former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-Texas, earned enough support to fall within the research's margin of error.

The Conservative Majority and Polls.  Every single major poll in the last fifty years has shown that conservatives outnumber liberals. [...] Indeed, if Republicans won those states and congressional districts in which conservatives outnumbered Democrats, they would have a clear and solid majority in Congress and easy presidential victories.  Republicans ought to embrace this and make each race one of conservatives against liberals — but Republicans shy away from this and are encouraged to do so by conservatives who simply do not believe that they are the ideological majority in America.  What makes this even more bizarre is that the most prestigious polling organization, Gallup, goes to extraordinary lengths to hide conservative strength.

Florida Governor:  DeSantis defeats Gillum.  The polls were wrong.  Gillum consistently was up by low single digits.

Poll that's never been wrong since 1946 signals GOP keeps House.  Half of Americans believe that Republicans will maintain control of the House in the midterm elections Tuesday, according to Gallup's final poll.  The result of that question has lined up with the actual election outcome every time Gallup has asked it since 1946.  Fifty percent of Americans believe Republicans will stay in power in the House, while 44 percent believe Democrats will take control.

Democratic Firm's Poll Of Texas:  Cruz 49, O'Rourke 49.  Too many other polls lately have Cruz at 50 percent or better to make me believe that Beto! can actually pull this off.

Midterm Myopia?  Pollsters On Trial.  With the harrowing vision of their disastrous performance in 2016 still fresh in their heads, pollsters far and wide have to be feeling mighty skittish as midterm elections beckon just hours from now.  There was seemingly little introspection among the polling class as to how things could have gone so terribly wrong in their near-unanimous proclamation that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in in the most recent national election.  But whether they acknowledge it or not, their outdated and myopic view of national politics is now threatened as never before.  Only Rasmussen and the much-maligned LA Times tracking poll detected the Trump wave and nailed the outcome.

One Last Look at the Old Polls While the New Ones Are All Over the Place.  The polls going into Tuesday are all over the place.  Some are obvious and clear:  Pocahontas will win in the tribal lands of Massachusetts, Gillibrand will win in New York, Hutchinson in Arkansas, Bernie in Vermont, McMaster in South Carolina.  But lots of key races really are hard to gauge.

What They Told Us:  Reviewing Last Week's Key Polls.  Election Day's almost here, and most pollsters are predicting a blue wave that will sweep the Democrats back into control of the House of Representatives.  But is another picture possible?

WashPo/ABC News Poll Has Ominous News For Democrats.  Despite the headlines about an eight-point advantage for Democrats in the generic congressional ballot, the detailed results of today's Washington Post/ABC News poll should make most Democratic Party leaders and their billionaire benefactors sweat.  First, the eight-point gap represents a five-point drop from the same poll just three weeks ago, when Democrats had a 13-point advantage. (Like most polls, the sample favors Democrats by six points among registered voters.)  But even more ominous for Democrats is how specific voting blocs responded.  If Democrats are going to win control of the House, they need to pull votes from independent women and women in the suburbs, and support for the generic Democratic congressional candidate has dropped significantly among these two groups.

What Do the Polls Say About a Blue Wave?  Since it's now clear that Democrats may not only fail to take control of the U.S. Senate, they actually could lose seats, all eyes are focused on the battle for the House of Representatives.  The political fortunes for congressional Republican candidates are the reverse of those with which their Senate counterparts are blessed.  In the Senate, Democrats are defending nearly two-dozen incumbent senators, many in states that Donald Trump won in 2016; if Republicans run the table, the GOP could get very close to a filibuster-proof Senate.

Polls Could Be Missing a GOP Surge.  Here's Why.  If the polls are correct, we're heading for either a good year for Democrats or a very good year for Democrats.

Report: Trump Approval Rating Much Higher Than Media Wants You To Believe.  It's another fake news moment by the Establishment Media.  They know it.  You know it.  Certainly, the Trump White House knows it.  Remember all of those polls in 2016 declaring Hillary Clinton the winner?  They were repeatedly slanted, skewed, a sham of an attempt to convince Trump supporters to stay home and assure Clinton voters of certain victory.

Trump's Real Job Approval Could Be as High as 60 Percent.  There are at least eight ways in which poll numbers are likely exaggerated against Trump — and thus Republicans in general:  [#1] Pollsters are asking the wrong question.  Every polling firm aside from Rasmussen appears to ask this exact question:  "Do you approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as President?"  Clearly, "handling" is a loaded term in the context of Trump:  there are millions of Americans who don't care for his "handling" of things — which largely speaks to demeanor and style — but are at the same time satisfied with his actual job performance and results. [...] [#2] Many firms produce consistently negative results, outside the norm, suggesting bias or a flawed approach. [...] [#3] Corporate media ignore Trump's successes and obsesses over issues that can be used to paint him in a bad light. [...] [#4] Many polling firms sample the wrong people — registered voters or all adults.  The only valid sample is likely voters.  Those who stay home on election day aren't part of the election results. [...]

Paradox Emerges In the Trump Presidency.  It's a paradox of the Trump presidency going into the midterm elections.  The economy is strong by conventional indicators — a 4.2% growth rate in real gross domestic product for the second quarter of 2018, according to the Commerce Department, and a 3.9% unemployment rate, according to the Labor Department.  The stock market has racked up impressive gains, with the Standard and Poor's 500 Index of large U.S. stocks up about 36% since Election Day 2016.  America is not mired in any high-profile military conflict generating televised casualties.  President Trump has no Iraq War, no Vietnam. [...] Yet surveys show Mr. Trump's job approval ratings and his favorability ratings underwater.  Polls find that a majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

The Editor says...
Most of the noise is coming from the Democratic Party, not the White House.  The Democrats can't stand to see Donald Trump succeed.

Do Democrats Trust Midterm Polling?  If midterm election polls increasingly show that Democrats are poised to regain control of the House, then why are liberals in panic mode?  What do they know that we don't — or that they don't want us to?  The highly touted opinion poll analyst, FiveThirtyEight, released an election update video reporting that Democrats have an 82 percent chance of winning a majority of the House in November.  The narrator breathlessly reveals that this is the first time their forecast has given the Democrats more than an 80 percent of winning the House since the launch of the model.  Yet an MSNBC panel was apoplectic over President Donald Trump's approval rating, which remained constant despite an avalanche of negative news stories concerning legal developments on Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.

'The System's Not Working' Is Liberal Speak For 'We're Not Getting What We Want'.  CNN released a new poll this week that alleges only 38 percent of Americans support the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, while 39 percent do not.  It was the lowest net approval of any Supreme Court nominee since Harriet Miers. [...] Kavanaugh is down by a single point in a CNN poll in a nation where more than half the people can't even name a single Supreme Court justice.  Never mind either that 2016 was the most SCOTUS-centric election we've had in modern times.  The GOP's presidential candidate provided a list of names then promised to nominate those people if he became president.


How To Lie With Polls:  Texas Senate Race Edition.  Like Wendy Davis was in 2014, O'Rourke is the Texas poster-child for national Democrats. [...] A few weeks ago, a new Lyceum Poll showed O'Rourke within two points of Cruz.  The first thing to check with a Lyceum Poll is how badly they skewed the sample.  That didn't take long:  They sampled equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, because evidently their samples are from 1994, they last time a top-of-the-ticket Democrat was within 10% of the vote total of the Republican.  Now this week we have a Marist poll that shows O'Rourke within four points of Cruz.  I'd like to tell you what level of skewing went into the Marist poll crosstabs, only I can't find any.  If that's the complete list of questions, they don't appear to have asked party affiliation, so there's no way to know just how skewed the smallish (759) sample of registered voters is.

CBS Rewrites History:  The Polls Weren't Wrong in 2016.  CBS attempted to rewrite history on Monday with This Morning co-host Norah O'Donnell and network Director of Elections Anthony Salvanto declaring that the polls in 2016 weren't wrong.  That might be a surprise to anyone who trusted the numbers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Helping Salvanto promote his new book on polling, O'Donnell wondered:  "People said that proved that the polls were wrong.  But were they?"  "No," he declared.  O'Donnell cheered the revisionist history:  "Yes, thank you!  Anthony, explain to everybody!"  Using the benefit of hindsight, Salvanto lectured:  "All the signs were there."

Polls and history continue to point to a Ted Cruz victory in Texas.  Many liberals have made it a cause célèbre to try to defeat Cruz.  Indeed, the attention paid to the Texas Senate race has been greater than for other more competitive races such as Tennessee, where Democrat Phil Bredesen has consistently led in polls against Republican Marsha Blackburn.  Yet the polling has continued to suggest that Cruz is ahead.  Just how much of a favorite is Cruz?

The Polls Are Crazy.  [T]he Washington Times cites the NBC/Wall St.  Journal poll for the proposition that Americans increasingly see Democrats as extreme: [...] That means voters are likely to swing to the GOP in the midterms, right?  Not so fast.  Rasmussen, hardly a left-wing bastion, finds Democrats pulling ahead on the generic Congressional ballot, now leading by seven points.  And those results are pretty typical.

Six Reasons Why Barack Obama Is the Worst President in History.  By now you've probably heard of polls that say Americans believe that "Donald Trump is the worst president in history" or that presidential scholars have ranked Trump "dead last."  I can tell you right now to ignore the polls and the so-called experts.  While it may be too early to properly gauge presidential rankings for recent presidents, I am confident that history will ultimately judge Barack Obama as the worst president our nation has ever seen.

America First Ohio Poll:  Nancy Pelosi Drags Down Democratic Party, Donald Trump Boosts GOP.  A new poll conducted by America First Action Super PAC, President Donald Trump's official Super PAC, shows that Democrats in Ohio are in serious trouble of losing their re-election bids while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi proves to be an anchor on her party's November chances.

48 Hours Later, Media Still Keeps Dems' Total Collapse in Reuters Poll a Secret.  On Monday [5/21/2018], Reuters/Ipsos announced that the Democratic Party's strong lead on the generic ballot question, which had remained stable for most of 2018, had rapidly collapsed over the prior week.  The #BlueWave narrative — the media's all-but-concluded assumption that Democrats would retake the House of Representatives from the GOP in November — has largely been based on the state of the generic ballot poll.  So you might assume the media tasked with covering the 2018 midterm elections would immediately react to a sudden shift in the most important metric available for predicting the most important outcome of those elections.

AP to offer election voter survey to replace exit polls.  The Associated Press said Tuesday [5/15/2018] that it will begin conducting an elaborate election voter survey designed to replace the traditional in-person exit poll, which has been criticized in recent years for inaccuracy and failing to keep up with changes in how Americans vote.

Hmmm... Who was the President for most of the last 11 years?
Poll: Optimism in Direction of Country Hits 11-Year High Under Trump.  A poll released by the far-left CNN shows that optimism about the direction of the country under President Trump has hit an 11-year high of 57 percent.  The last time this same poll registered a number that high was in January 2007.  This includes 40 percent of Democrats, which is a leap of 15 points from just last month.  Only 40 percent say things are going badly.  Also of note is that CNN polled a random sample of adults.  Polls that screen for registered or likely voters generally produce a more favorable result for Trump.  This poll is a good example.  While Trump's job approval rating sits at 41 percent with all adults, when CNN's polling firm (SSRS) screened for registered voters, the president's job approval rating jumped to 44 percent.

The 2016 election was far from a fluke.  America's political experts got it wrong in 2016 — not because they took too few polls, but because they made the false assumption that American elections are immune to societal change.

Spike in Support for Trump Causes Pollster to Reject [His] Own Poll.  A poll shows that President Donald Trump's approval rating has spiked since April 27 — prompting the Reuters/Ipsos polling team to quarantine their data.  "Every series of polls has the occasional outlier and in our opinion this is one," the pollster announced.  "So, while we are reporting the findings in the interest of transparency, we will not be announcing the start of a new trend until we have more data to validate this pattern."

Make a note of this announcement, and check back in a year.
CNN poll:  President Trump will lose in 2020, majority of Americans say.  More than half of Americans think President Trump is doomed in his 2020 re-election bid, according to a new CNN poll released Thursday [3/29/2018].  Per the poll, 54% said said they think Trump will lose in 2020.  Comparably, 40% expect him to win.

Media using phony polls to force narrative of Trump failure.  [Scroll down]  This is reminiscent of opinion polls during the presidential campaign.  In mid 2016, I wrote about an ABC News poll gleefully proclaiming a 12 point lead for Clinton over Trump.  This survey oversampled Democrats by 12 points, accounting for the poll result.  The reality was a dead heat at that time.  This current poll is no different, inaccurately reflecting public sentiment, instead advancing the left-wing media agenda that Trump is unpopular, that Americans regret electing him.  Wishful thinking on their part.

Collapse of Credibility In Mainstream Press Puts Burden on Readers.  Take, for example, the New York Times news article reporting on President Trump's decision to hire Lawrence Kudlow as chairman of the National Economic Council.  It devoted three paragraphs to a poll that "found support dipping slightly for Mr. Trump's signature tax law:  49 percent of respondents approved of the bill, down from 51 percent in February."  Given that the poll's margin of sampling error was 1.5%, the idea that a two percentage point move either way is newsworthy is questionable.  If the poll had moved two percentage points in the other direction and President Trump tweeted triumphantly about it, you can bet that Times "fact-checkers" would have been all over his case about being statistically illiterate.

Media step back from Democrat 'blue wave' predictions.  The national media are scaling back their prediction for a Democratic "blue wave" in the 2018 midterms, in light of a new poll that shows some Democrats are vulnerable and a healthy GOP turnout in Texas this week.  Fueled in part by Republican-backed tax cuts that increased the paychecks for most people, Republicans and President Trump have seen their own poll numbers rise, and what was previously viewed as a coming reckoning by Democrats has stalled.  The website Axios on Thursday [3/8/2018] published a poll that showed "big warning signs for Senate Democrats."  It noted that in 10 states where Democrats are defending Senate seats, a Republican opponent polls either ahead or close to the Democrat in five of those states (though in most of the races, the GOP has not chosen its nominee yet).  The poll also showed that in most states, Trump's approval rating is 50 percent or higher, which could be a sign that he will not have a negative impact on those state races.

It Appears CNN Might Be Skewing Poll Results To Make Trump Look Bad.  If you were ask Rasmussen what Trump is polling at, they'd tell you he's sporting a healthy 49 percent approval rating.  If you asked CNN, however, they'd tell you it's far lower at 35 percent.  That seems like a huge discrepancy, so what's the deal?  Enter the Daily Caller, who decided to get down to the bottom of the mystery of the missing approval numbers, and what they found shows that CNN might not be playing all that fair.  Collecting the data from CNN and SSRS, a market research firm, the Daily Caller showed several factors that could contribute to the disparity between polls, including two major factors.  For starters CNN/SSRS poll over-sampled Democrats and Independents, and it sampled "adults," not potential voters.

I Thought America Hated Donald Trump.  Watch any cable or network news station or read the newspaper, and you will be told that President Trump is unpopular.  That Americans don't like him.  The Washington Post proclaims that "Trump is historically unpopular."  Predicting big trouble ahead for Republicans, the Post tells readers, "There's never been a president who was as deeply unpopular for as long as he has been at this stage of his presidency."  Newsweek goes farther with its headline:  "Trump's 2018 approval ratings show he's the most unpopular president in history and failing at his job."  The Washington Examiner, not a far-left publication but firmly in the NeverTrump camp, asks, "So why is Trump still the most unpopular first-term president?"  You get the point.  These articles were all written last month, in the wake of a historic tax cut, with millions of Americans gaining bonuses and a fatter paycheck, plus a stock market hitting record highs despite a recent and necessary correction.  Yet the media smart set is quite certain that America hates President Trump.  Why?  Opinion polls.  You know the names.  Quinnipiac, Ipsos, Rasmussen, CNN, Fox News, and others.  Remember these same polls about 15 months ago?  The ones that predicted with 95-plus-percent certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the election?  Even on election day?

Now, why would Americans' positive perception of the U.S. surge this past year?  A new Gallup Poll finds that nearly half of all Americans are satisfied with their perception of the U.S. position in the world.  That's the highest that collective national perception has been in 13 years.  And, get this, the 45 percent who feel that way is fully 13 points higher than it was just a year ago.  Why do you suppose that is?  A year ago.  Hmm, what happened in the winter of 2017 that could possibly explain a surge in positive self-perceptions of the U.S. global position?

Don't know much about history....  This new poll, put out by a couple of political science professors, places President Trump at rock bottom in its rankings of all the U.S. presidents.  Worse than Warren G. Harding.  Worse than James Buchanan.  Worse than Franklin Pierce.  Worse than Jimmy Carter.  And certainly worse than Barack Obama, who correspondingly rose to the top ten in the same estimation of the same political scientists.  After bringing us the Iran deal, Obamacare, the one-way love-fest with Castro, the unmaskings, the IRS targeting of dissidents, the global apology tour, the SEIU thugcraft, the politicization of the Department of Justice, and Ben Rhodes, he's top ten!

Obama Campaign Manager Wants Pollsters "Shot" For Recent Polls Showing Democrats Losing Support Among Voters.  Jim Messina is an odd guy.  Always has been.  Always will be.  He was the lumpy outcast with a penchant for canoodling just enough with the then-Obama campaign's legion of media supporters to give himself some political street cred.  Work was easy back then though.  Obama had few strong opponents in D.C., and fewer still among the media elite.  Then came Donald Trump and Jim Messina's world was turned upside down.  The manufactured polls he once used to great effect to manipulate opinion and validate Barack Obama have been discarded in favor of a single Trump Tweet.  And now when those same once-friendly polls show Mr. Trump gaining in popularity and Democrats increasingly despised, Jim Messina offers up this rather aggressive solution:  "I think all public pollsters should be shot."

The Last Two Weeks of Polls Have Been Great for Republicans.  Do They Signal a Shift?  The Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot, which asks people whether they'll vote for Democrats or Republicans for Congress, has dwindled since the heart of the tax debate in December.  Then, nearly all surveys put Republicans behind by double digits.  Now, poll averages put the Democratic lead at only around six or seven percentage points.  The question isn't really whether Republican standing has improved recently.  It has.  The question is whether anyone should care:  Is it just one of many blips and bumps along the road, or does it say something meaningful about the midterm elections?

'Blue Wave' Evaporates, 2018 Generic Ballot Back to Dead Heat.  A Monmouth University poll released Wednesday shows Democrats with only a "negligible edge" over Republicans for November's Congressional elections.  The poll, conducted over three days almost entirely before President Donald Trump's well-received State of the Union Address, shows 47 percent of respondents saying they would vote for a generic congressional Democrat compared to 45 percent for a generic Republican, well within the poll's 3.5 percent margin of error.  This figure is a massive shift from earlier polls showing double digit Democratic leads and fueling pundits' talk of a "blue wave" that could sweep Republicans from power.  The same polling agency, the Monmouth University Polling Institute (MUPI), found a 15 point generic Democratic advantage using the same question only last month.

Pollster Zogby:  Trump brought 'A game,' boosted GOP 2018 chances, 2020 re-election.  In an unusually positive review, Democratic pollster John Zogby said that President Trump brought his "A game" to the State of the Union Address and bolstered chances that the GOP will retain control of Congress in the midterm elections and maybe his own re-election odds.  "He hit a solid triple tonight.  If he can sustain this message and tone, he will cross home plate standing up," blogged Zogby, who co-authors our weekly White House Report Card.

CNN polled the audience on Trump's State of the Union and soon came to regret it.  CNN may have been hoping for a different outcome as results from their poll on President Trump's State of the Union address came back to bite them.  It seems 70 percent of those polled who were watching the speech reacted positively according to an instant CNN/SSRS poll, CNN reported.

"Hey Google... How's The US Economy Doing?"  On a quarterly basis we use Google Trends as essentially a thermometer for a range of social and capital markets measurements.  How are Americans feeling about themselves and their economic prospects?  Are they interested in investing?  Those are queries most often answered by polls and surveys, of course.  But Google Trends lets us see what people are searching for online, in the privacy of their homes.  And that can be much more telling than what they reveal to a random phone survey taker.

Everything Is Looking Up, Except For Trump's Approval Rating:  IBD/TIPP Poll.  The public is more upbeat about the direction of the country and the economy, less likely to be looking for a job and less stressed.  Yet they're not giving President Trump much of the credit, the latest IBD/TIPP Poll shows.

On Christmas Eve, Donald Trump Challenges 'Fake News' for Negative Reporting on 'Incredible Year'.  President Donald Trump continued to criticize fake news, even on Christmas Eve.  He appeared frustrated by reports that showed his base was shrinking, accusing them of running fake polls to set their narrative. [...] Trump indicated that White House polling showed that his base was still strong, especially after passing significant tax reform.

How The Media Tries To Pressure Gun Rights Advocates Into Gun Control Support.  Despite claims to the contrary, gun rights advocates are a large and active voting block.  There's a reason lawmakers in pro-gun regions — regions that make up the bulk of the nation — make it a point to present their pro-gun credentials when running for office.  While polls occasionally claim most people support some kind of gun control, those polls rarely delve deeper into how important the issue is for those people.  Most don't so much support new regulations so much as think, "Yeah, sounds good."  In their minds, however, there are bigger issues to tackle and so they don't care enough about gun control for it to make a difference in their voting.

Who Says The GOP Tax Cuts Are Unpopular?  Poll after poll shows that few support the Republican tax-cut plan.  But when pollsters bother to ask about specifics in the bill, support skyrockets.  Guess which results make the headlines?

Breaking Down The CBS News Gun Poll.  CBS News released the results of a new poll on the topic of guns.  There are some interesting tidbits in there for discussion, but there's also a lot that shouldn't be overly surprising.

Credibility of Fox News On the Line with Poll That Shows Jones Up by 10.  Fox News put its credibility on the line when it released a new poll on Monday that shows liberal Democrat Doug Jones leads conservative Republican Roy Moore by 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent, in tomorrow's special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama.  The contrast between the results reported by Fox News and every other recent major poll could not be sharper.

Media Manuevers To Manipulate Alabama Voters.  Fox News is back in action with the single most ridiculous, psy-op engineered, agenda polls in the last several years[,] and coming from a CTH community that has reviewed hundreds of media polls in the past 5 years, that's quite a statement. [...] There is a NINETEEN point difference between both Alabama Polls.  However, only ONE is a media driven agenda poll.  Can you guess which one?

Sick and Tired of Schumer and Others Continually Lying about Tax Cuts and Debt.  What makes me sicker is that almost all reporters just repeat Schumer's talking points as if they are factual.  They repeat the outright lies over and over again, and then after indoctrinating the readers with pure garbage, they take a poll of fewer than 1,000 people, skewed with more Democrats than Republicans, to show that the people aren't in favor of reform.  Then they run the poll results as if they are somehow factual news.  Reporters should be truly ashamed of themselves for pushing an agenda instead of ever even considering reporting actual results of previous tax cuts.

Call Florida and get some hanging chads!
Exclusive: New poll shows Roy Moore and Doug Jones in statistical tie.  A new Raycom News Network Senate Election poll conducted by Strategy Research finds the race in a statistical tie nearly two weeks after allegations of sexual misconduct against Republican Roy Moore rocked the campaign.  The exclusive poll of 3,000 likely Alabama voters finds if the election were held today, Moore would receive 47% of the vote to Democrat Doug Jones with 45%.  Five percent of the respondents remain undecided with 3% indicating plans to Write-In a candidate.

Democrat Oversample:  Fox News Poll Claims Roy Moore Losing Despite Faulty Numbers.  A Fox News Poll of 649 likely voters in Alabama released on Thursday and conducted between Monday and Wednesday of this week shows Democratic candidate Doug Jones with an eight point lead over Republican candidate Judge Roy Moore in the December 12 special election for the Alabama U.S. Senate seat once held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, 50 percent to 42 percent, with a 3.5 percent margin of error.  That poll stands in striking contrast to a Fox10/Strategy Research poll of 3,000 likely voters in Alabama released on Wednesday [11/15/2017] and conducted on Monday of this week that shows Moore with a six point lead over Jones, 49 percent to 43 percent, with a two percent margin of error.

Fox News poll:  Jones beating Moore by 8 points.  A new poll shows Democrat Doug Jones leading by 8 points in the Alabama Senate race in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against his opponent, GOP candidate Roy Moore.  Jones is supported by 50 percent of likely voters surveyed in the deep-red state, while 42 percent of likely voters support Moore, according to the Fox News poll released Thursday.  The survey was conducted Nov. 13-15.  The last Fox News poll on the race, conducted in mid-October, showed Jones and Moore tied.  Another recent poll from the Senate GOP's campaign arm showed Moore trailing by double digits.

The lesson the media refuses to learn.  So let us go back and revisit where they went wrong.  They trusted polls.  A year ago today, Nate Silver gave Donald Trump less than a 14% chance of winning — two weeks before the election.  His prediction was 338 Electoral College votes for her, 198 for Trump.  Silver saw her taking all of Obama's 2012 states, plus Arizona and North Carolina.  Michigan?  Michigan!  Don't make me laugh.  He gave Trump an 8% chance in Michigan.  Democrats would take the Senate.  And Silver was the cautious one.

New Political Poll Shows Just How Unreliable Polling Can Be.  A new survey from NBC News/Wall Street Journal is the perfect example of the utter worthlessness of public polling as it relates to the implementation of government policy.  In the poll, which covers numerous political topics, one question stands out:  "Would you favor or oppose a single-payer health care system in which all Americans would get their health insurance from one government plan that is financed by Taxes?"  To this question, 47% said they "favored" such a system, 46% said they "opposed," and 7% said they were "not sure."  However, when pollsters added a bit of specificity to the question, the results changed rather dramatically.

Bias chart 402
Fakepolls: How Legacy Media Manipulates Polling and Lies to You About... Everything.  [Scroll down]  In every poll, Democrat respondents outnumbered Republicans by significant amounts.  The Economist poll was the worst.  Only 24 percent of respondents (360) were Republicans compared to 38 percent (570) Democrats — which means that 58 percent more Democrats were polled than Republicans, as shown in the %D/R column.  On average, in these seven widely recognized national polls, only 29 percent (409 people) of the total 1,383 polled were Republicans, while 37 percent (518) were Democrats.  Another way of saying it is that, on average, 29 percent more Democrats than Republicans were polled.  This occurs because of the way these polls are constructed.  Most use a methodology that queries a random sample of adults.  That sounds "fair" and one would expect it to produce roughly equivalent numbers of Republicans and Democrats, but it does not.

Sharyl Attkisson embarrasses media for the shoddy way they report on polls.  Wait, you mean the media isn't exactly straightforward with how they conduct and report on polls?

USA Today's Impeachment-Push Poll.  Reporters Susan Page and Emma Kinery proclaimed a dark omen in the results, which is why the newspaper asked the poll question.  They said, "Just six months after his inauguration, Americans already are split down the middle, 42%-42%, over whether President Trump should be removed from office, a new USA TODAY/iMediaEthics Poll finds."  What's the impeachable offense?  If a national poll were to emerge with a 42-42 tie over the belief that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, would the subsequent analysis focus on the concentration of moon matter or the irrationality of 42% of the American people?  It doesn't matter that the prospect for impeachment is zero with Republicans in control of Congress.

How Approval Polls and 'Junk' Journalism are Fake Views Pushed by Fake News.  The latest rod by which to beat the President of the United States is a Washington Post/ABC News poll showing Mr. Trump's approval ratings languishing at 36 percent. [...] The poll was performed by AbtAssociates — a swamp dweller-staffed research and policy shop in Cambridge, MA.  AbtAssociates board members include former Bob Dole, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood, World Bank, and Deloitte staffers.  In other words, it is a microcosm of the party of Davos.

Busted! Trump Favorability Polls As Fake As Fake News Can Get.  Want to know a dirty little secret liberal media pundits don't want you to know?  Donald Trump is far more popular with the American people than any of the far left polling data would have you believe.  Those very same polls that were so wrong in predicted the 2016 presidential outcome are being used again to try and convince Americans Trump is an unpopular and highly divisive president.  These polling firms lied repeatedly during the 2016 election cycle and they have continued lying about the POTUS Trump's popularity among voters.

Pollsters Are Screwing Up Again.  Most national pollsters are back churning out biased and misleading poll numbers after recovering from their shock over President Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group analysis.  "I do know inherently there is a Democratic bias in the polls.  And most of them will deny it" says Raghavan Mayur, an independent pollster who is president of TechnoMetrica, which leads the polling operations at Investor's Business Daily.


Why You Should Be Skeptical About Polls on Impeaching Trump.  Among registered voters in a Politico/Morning Consult poll at the end of May, 43% want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump, up from 38% the week before.  But experts say the polls may mean less than they appear to show.  Three polls by CNN/ORC showed roughly similar numbers of adults-about 30%-wanted to impeach President Clinton in 1998, President Bush in 2006 and President Obama in 2014, even though the presidents were in very different circumstances.  And Gallup polls from the Watergate era show a clear majority of Americans didn't support impeaching Nixon and removing him from office until August of 1974-the same month he resigned.

From Fake News to Fake Polls.  The media blob is making much of a Washington Post/ABC News poll that finds the public by a 2 to 1 margin opposes President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord: [...] You need to click through to the actual poll questions to see what [an incompetent] poll it is.  The poll only asked five questions. [...] Conspicuously missing are any questions about whether people support appropriations for wealth transfers from the U.S to developing nations that the Paris Accord included (and into which Obama tossed $1 billion)?  No questions, also, about whether people are willing to pay higher energy costs for an agreement that will make no difference to the planet's temperature 80 years from now, according to the EPA's own models.

Who Really Torpedoed Hillary's Campaign?  What about the polls?  All the smart set pollsters told us Clinton would win.  In a landslide.  From Real Clear Politics to poll guru Nate Silver, all agreed that Mrs. Clinton had a 90 to 95 percent chance of winning.  And stuck with this up until election night.

Rigged NBC/WSJ POLL Claims Trump Hits "Historic Lows" — 100% FALSE!.  The sample size was only 900 people!  Please note the number of people who are "Strong Republicans" 19% — If you add the people who consider themselves to be Republicans, it's 38%.  Does this sample size reflect a fair sample size?  We think not!

Wash Post poll hides:  Trump still beats Clinton, 43%-40%.  A new Washington Post poll that declares President Trump as "the least popular president in modern times," waits until the second to last paragraph to reveal another tidbit:  He'd still beat Hillary Rodham Clinton if the election were held today and in the popular vote, not just Electoral College.  The poll found that Trump's polls continue to be upside down, with a 42 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval.

Hillary ran the worst presidential campaign ever.  In the last weeks before the election, the Hillary Clinton campaign did no polling.  No.  Polling.  Whatsoever.  Oh, it had data.  Lots and lots of data.  Analytics, even.  Data analytics!  But it had no independent information on the overall field of battle in states like Florida, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  So when the election began to turn Donald Trump's way, the Clinton campaign had no idea.

Democrats burned by polling blind spot.  As they investigate the forces behind the party's stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion.  The party didn't just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well.  Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party's polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump's upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states.

AP Touts Anti-Trump Poll with Warped Demographics Conducted by Soros-Backed Org.  The Associated Press on Monday released a news making story with a glaring headline claiming that "Most young Americans don't see Trump as a legitimate leader."  A closer look at the survey finds it was conducted by a group financed by billionaire George Soros whose activist arm demands reparations for slavery and "mass incarceration," and has engaged in anti-police activism.  In addition, the survey was not representative of the racial and ethnic profiles of young adults.  Instead it focused heavily on demographic samples of populations that voted overwhelmingly against Donald Trump.

The Media Hides Its Own Disapproval Rating.  The latest poll by USA Today and Suffolk University carried some eye-opening numbers about public disapproval of the media's aggressive attempts to run the country.  It found that President Trump has a 47% approval rating and that 44% disapprove of him.  That's not surprising.  The media talk about his unpopularity all the time.  But here's what they don't talk about:  their own numbers.  Only 37% of Americans have a favorable opinion of their job performance.  A whopping 50% have an unfavorable opinion.

52% Voters Approve Trump Job Performance — Stat Buried in 2nd-to-Last Graph of Story.  A Politico/Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday [3/15/2017] shows 52 percent of voters approve of President Donald Trump's job performance, but that statistic is in the second-to-last paragraph of the Politico article about the poll.

A new poll shows a majority think Jeff Sessions lied and should resign.  Be skeptical.  A new poll from Quinnipiac University has a splashy finding:  A majority of people think that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied under oath about his communications with Russian officials while working with the Trump campaign and should resign — 52 percent and 51 percent, according to the poll.  I was a little surprised by this.  And upon further inspection, there are a few reasons for skepticism. [...] This poll seems to be a great example of the way you ask the question determining the answers you get.

YouGov poll:  Majority of Dems consider Trump an "enemy," majority of Republicans consider Democrats an "enemy".  Among Republicans, 43 percent say the media is an "enemy" while another 35 percent say it's "unfriendly."  Interestingly, despite endless whining from Democrats online that the media is either too right-wing or insufficiently left, fully 60 percent of Democrats polled here acknowledge that the media is either an "ally" or "friendly."  I wonder about the phrasing of the questions, though.  Instead of asking straightforwardly "Do you regard the media as an enemy?", YouGov asked "Would you say that the media is an enemy to people like you?"  Phrasing it that way leaves it unclear to the respondent which way the hostility is supposed to be running in the "enemy" relationship.

Trump is stronger than national polls suggest.  President Trump is still popular in core Republican strongholds, even though he has suffered a dip in the national public opinion polls.  Trump's approval rating is 45 percent, an underwater mark previously unseen for a president this early in his first term.  But Trump's image and his policies are holding up just fine among voters in Republican districts and states key to the president's ability to drive his agenda through Congress, and his party's success in 2018.

About Those Latest Media Polls.  Amid the jaw-dropping revelations within the U.S. body politic in 2016, one of the most important was the American electorate discovering that Media Polling is just as brutally biased as the media entities who present the polling results.  With election 2016 behind us, and predicting "media opinion polls" once again being used in 2017 to create false narratives, the truth behind the intentionally constructed 2016 deception must not simply fade back into the shadows.  Never again should the American voter trust polling presented by corporate media.  Everything about media polling is a financed and manufactured fraud.

Jake Tapper: 'The Media Is in a Rough Place Right Now' After Misreading Election.  CNN's Jake Tapper spoke candidly with TheWrap in an interview out today about what the press needs to do to "regain ground" with the American people after getting the election so wrong.  On election night, Tapper said that if Trump ends up winning, it may "put the polling industry out of business."

The Editor says...
The polling industry will never go out of business for at least two reasons:  First, because one cannot underestimate the gullibility of couch-potato consumers of TV news shows; and second because most TV news organizations don't have their own polling people on staff, so they rely on polls that they read about in the New York Times.

Trump slams 'rigged' polls of his public approval.  President-elect Donald Trump blasted 'rigged' opinion polls Tuesday [1/17/2017] as two different surveys pegged him as the least popular man to take the oath of office in four decades, with a popularity rating just half of what Barack Obama's was eight years ago.  'The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls,' Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.  'They are rigged just like before.'  Trump set out his missive amid blaring headlines about his record-low popularity upon taking office, and negative ratings for his handling of the transition period.

New ABC / WaPo Poll Shows Drop In Trump Favorability Courtesy Of Aggressive "Oversamples".  In the month leading up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead.  In fact, just 16 days prior to the election an ABC/Wapo poll showed a 12-point lead for Hillary, a result that obviously turned out to be embarrassingly wrong for the pollsters.  But, proving they still got it, ABC/Washington Post and CNN are out with a pair of polls on Trump's favorability this morning that sport some of the most egregious "oversamples" we've seen.

Fake Polls?  How CNN And ABC Are Fudging The Numbers To Tank Trump's Favorability.  Two polls released Tuesday — one from ABC and a second from CNN — tout Donald Trump as being the most unfavorable incoming president in modern history — yet on second look, the data is clearly boosted by the pollers' decision to oversample Democrats.

Fake Poll News:  Public Says Trump Can't Handle Being President?  A Gallup poll seemed to put a damper on Donald Trump's presidency before he's even sworn in, with fewer than half the public saying he's up to the job of being president.  At least, that's how the results are being reported.  But a closer look at the data tells a much different story.

Don't Fall For This Poll Showing Only About 1 in 4 Wants Trump to Repeal Obamacare.  The Kaiser in question, creator of the Kaiser Family Foundation, was a rich industrialist and auto manufacturer who also founded Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care organizations in America, and a primary beneficiary of Obamacare.  As for the biased nature of anything issuing from the polling fundament of the Associated Press, after the egregious fiascos committed during the campaign season in AP's headlong, all-in efforts to stop Trump and elect Hillary, little more needs to be said.  Another dead giveaway:  No link to the poll's internals.

Pat Caddell: 'Grace, That's What's Missing' as Obamas Prepare to Leave White House.  Political pollster and analyst Pat Caddell told Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday [12/19/2016] that, concerning the Obamas leaving the White House, "We are watching this ending here.  It's not quite as bad as the Clintons ... but the lack of grace, that's what's missing here." [...] Additionally, pointing out that, post-election, no one in major media was fired or demoted for getting the election so wrong.  "None of them have been fired.  Are you kidding?" he said.  "The pollsters who are bad," he continued, "what are they doing?  They're back with new polls this week."

Malcolm Turnbull says opinion polls are unreliable after Donald Trump's shock win in the US election.  Opinion polls are no longer a reliable indicator of political outcomes according to Malcolm Turnbull.  The Australian Prime Minister says following political events such as Donald Trump's presidential win and Brexit, results from opinion polls should be met with some skepticism.

Fake News Versus Junk News.  The big "fake news" stories of 2016 were the polls.  Most showed Donald Trump losing big in November, thus cable news ran countless renditions of the many ways Trump could not possibly win the necessary Electoral College vote.  Getting the story utterly wrong should result in hand-wringing, hair-pulling and painful introspection in my profession; instead many in the news business have turned their hungry eyes on "fake news" disseminated on Facebook and Google.  That's right.  After a year of getting the story consistently wrong, journalism gurus are pointing to phony stories not produced by the mainstream media.

When Polls Become Idols.  Hillary and her supporters on PBS, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS are always using the word "inclusivity" as expressing her vision for America, thus they suppose that Trump's interest in putting more controls on illegal immigration or refugee admission is exclusionary, whereas he is merely talking about some practical restraints, not the elimination of our inclusive history.  Thus, polling pundits failed to factor out or offset their own P.C. bias in interpreting the feedback from voters and potential voters.  Pollsters must ask questions, and the questions as well as the hearing of the answers require an interpretive cognitive framework that governs the creation of the questions and the understanding of the responses.  Thus, the polling questions may be distorted and colored by bias from beginning to end.

Putting the Polling Miss of the 2016 Election in Perspective.  Over all, the national polls missed the result by only a few points:  Hillary Clinton is on track to win the popular vote by around 1.5 percentage points, not especially far from her roughly four-point lead in an average of national polls.  But the state polls were a different story.  They systematically underestimated Donald J. Trump's standing in the Upper Midwest and Northeast.  His strength there was enough to make him the president.  Few saw it coming.

Post-election thoughts from a 'deplorable'.  Wikileaks also exposed the collusion with the Clinton campaign and pollsters and the MSM; thus the public refused to believe those polls showing Hillary winning.  Trump also cited a warning of this deceit.  We no longer believed anything reported in the mainstream press which had abdicated all journalistic ethics by their blatant bias for Clinton.

The PPD Poll Was the Most Accurate in 2016. It Wasn't Even Close.  The USC Dornsife/LA Times Presidential Election Poll and Investor's Business Daily TIPP Poll are taking victory laps for predicting Donald J. Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton.  But they, and those in the media citing them, are inaccurately claiming those two polls were the only two that got it right.  "Not one other national poll had Trump winning in four-way polls," IBD Editorials falsely claimed last week.  Sorry, but that's incorrect.  In fact, they predicted the eventual winner, but missed the actual margin.

Election Pundits:  Clueless, Spectacularly Clueless.  On October 1, according to the New York Times, the odds were 76 percent in Hillary Clinton's favour and steadily increased from there.  On the very eve of the election the Times declared that the probability of a Clinton victory was 85 percent.  The pollsters tried hard.  After the unexpected victory of Brexit in the United Kingdom, they realised that their models could be wrong.  They tried to take into account voter turn-out and the limitations of telephone polling.  They failed.  But it wasn't just the number crunchers who failed.  The pundits read in the tea leaves that Clinton would bring together a coalition of workers, professionals, black and Hispanics which would propel her to victory. [...] Yet she lost.

The Media and the Pollsters have lost their clout by incompetence and deceit.  Pre-election night polls and media coverage reflected that leftist monoculture.  The pollsters who should now begin shuttering their shops and looking for real work.  After months of predicting a certain substantial Hillary win, they predicted the following results:
    NBC/SM: Clinton +6
    Ipsos:  Clinton +4
    NBC/WSJ: Clinton +4
    ABC/WaPo:  Clinton +4
    Herald:  Clinton +4
    Bloomberg:  Clinton +3
Only IBD and Dornslife predicted a Trump win.


An Important Post-Election Message About Media PollingThe media didn't get it wrong.  The pollsters did not work from the wrong data set; the media pollsters, consultants and professional political class did not work from the wrong assumptions, or use the incorrect baselines.  THEY LIED.  The professional media polling agents knew exactly what the truth was.  They lied and manipulated their data in a concerted effort to intentionally falsify reality.  There should be no doubt, EVER, in the mind of any political observer as to what took place within the expressed and broadcasted polling which fueled over two years of broadcast news.  The media intentionally lied.  They knew the truth.  The same tools available to us, and to those who were ridiculed for truth-telling, were available to them and many more.  They did not get it wrong.  They chose to lie to you the American electorate.

How the polls, including ours, missed Trump's victory.  Two days ago, pollsters and statisticians gave Hillary Clinton odds of between 75 and 99 percent of winning the U.S. presidential election.  How did so many get it so wrong?  In hindsight, the polling consensus went astray in two major ways.  The media, including Reuters, pumped out two kinds of poll stories.  Some were national surveys designed to estimate the entire country's popular vote, but not the outcome in individual states, where the contest is actually decided. [...] News organizations also produced a blizzard of stories meant to calculate the probability of victory for the two candidates.  These calculations were predicated on polls of individual states.

Results call future of political polling into question.  For pollsters, the 2016 presidential election will go down as more than an embarrassment — it threatens to spiral into an existential crisis.  At the moment we needed them most, when the nation was desperate for accurate projections, many pollsters whiffed.  Although most correctly predicted Hillary Clinton's narrow popular-vote victory, vaunted poll averages and complex mathematical forecasts largely failed to envision Donald Trump's rise to the presidency through a convincing triumph in the Electoral College.  The ramifications reverberated swiftly Wednesday, as pundits and voters mocked the surveyors for bumbling their quadrennial moment in the spotlight.

How did polls miss the presidential election result so badly?  Heading into Election Day, virtually all public polling — at the national and swing-state level — pointed to a relatively easy victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton.  That, um, didn't happen.  In search of the "why" behind that poll fail, I contacted my longtime friend Jon Cohen.  Jon was once the head of polling at The Washington Post, but in his new life he serves as the senior vice president of Survey Monkey, the leading purveyor of Internet-based polls.

Pollsters suffer huge embarrassment.  Pollsters and election modelers suffered an industry-shattering embarrassment at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday night.  Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had long said the polls were biased against him.  His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.  "It's going to put the polling industry out of business," said CNN anchor Jake Tapper.  "It's going to put the voter projection industry out of business."

Sabato's Final Calls:  Hillary Wins Big, 50-50 Senate.  Hillary Clinton will win the presidency with more than 300 electoral votes, and the Senate will be tied at 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats according to Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball final projections ahead of Tuesday's vote.

How Did Polls & Experts Get the 2016 Election So Wrong?  Donald Trump defied the pundits and polls to defeat Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's presidential election.  Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, appeared on "Fox & Friends" this morning to explain how pollsters' predictions — which overwhelmingly favored Clinton — were so wrong.

The USC/L.A. Times poll saw what other surveys missed:  A wave of Trump support.  For most of the last four months, the USC/L.A. Times Daybreak tracking poll has been the great outlier of the 2016 campaign — consistently showing a better result for Donald Trump than other surveys did.  In light of Tuesday's election returns, the poll now looks like the only major survey to see the wave coming.

Let's laugh!  Here are the final media polls before election.  All of the so called "pollsters" and eggheads were so convinced that Hillary Clinton would win the election and likely get at least 300 EVs.  There were only two polls yesterday which showed a win for Donald Trump.  The L.A. Times daily tracking poll which had Trump +3 and the IBD/TPPP poll which had Trump winning by two in a four way race.  The other polls, all had Hillary Clinton winning.  Let's review them and mock them.

What Trump's upset win teaches us about free will and the limits of statistics.  [Scroll down]  Today, statistics are being used for everything from determining health care costs to how to educate our children to who is likely to be a criminal.  In some cases, academics are advocating abandoning our understanding of basic human rights to promote healthier living through science.  If we can use numbers to determine who will be a criminal and who won't, why bother with this whole justice system folderol?  This is the same mindset that drove the American eugenics movement, where experts thought they had the knowledge to know who was fit to reproduce.  Basically, a blind faith in data is in danger of driving the surrender of essential liberty to government planners who know better.  The Austrian School understood, nearly 100 ago, that such planning is impossible to do effectively because people are not cogs in a machine.  They are individuals capable of choosing their own fates.

How did pollsters get Trump, Clinton election so wrong?  Pollsters flubbed the 2016 presidential election in seismic fashion.  Donald Trump's victory dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of the nation's leading pollsters, calling into question their mathematical models, assumptions and survey methods.  Several months of polls pegged Hillary Clinton as the leader in the polarizing race and as the leader in many key battleground states.  But Trump's surge crushed the conventional wisdom among pollsters.  Early Wednesday [11/9/2016], he was far outpacing projections across the board.

Pollsters suffer huge embarrassment.  Pollsters and election modelers suffered an industry-shattering embarrassment at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday night.  Trump had long said the polls were biased against him.  His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.  "It's going to put the polling industry out of business," said CNN anchor Jake Tapper.  "It's going to put the voter projection industry out of business."  Going into Election Day, a strong majority of pollsters and election modelers forecast that Hillary Clinton would coast to victory, with many predicting she would sweep the battlegrounds and win north of 300 electoral votes.  The final University of Virginia Center for Politics model had Clinton winning 322 electoral votes to 216 for Trump, with Clinton winning Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all states that she lost.

Exit polls under siege.  Ever since Jimmy Carter's early concession in 1980 was blamed for losses to down-ballot Democrats in Western states, both politicians and media outlets have been religious about not reporting the results until everyone's voted.  But that's all about to change, starting early Tuesday morning [11/8/2016].  This year, a handful of different projects are underway to disrupt the rhythm and flow of information on Election Day — including one controversial effort that some worry could affect the actual election results.

When It Comes to Polls, We Need Something Between Absolute Faith and Absolute Denial.  Yes, the polls in 2012 were off, with the average pollster underestimating Obama's lead and largely unprepared for how effectively the Obama campaign's get-out-the-vote effort would change the electorate.  But most of the polls were off by one, two, or three percentage points.  Yes, the polls in 2014 were off, with the average pollster overestimating Senate Democratic candidates' performance by 4 percentage points and overestimating gubernatorial Democratic candidates' performance by 3 percentage points.  But quite a few elections that year were outside that margin.  Yes, every once in a while, you get a race where the election day winner didn't lead any poll — like Republican Larry Hogan's victory in Maryland in 2014 and Matt Bevin's victory in Kentucky in 2015.  Yes, sometimes you'll get very contradictory results from different pollsters surveying the same state at the same time.

Polls Are Still Being Used as Weapons.  The major polls that everybody talks about, NBC, ABC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Monmouth, you name it, all show Hillary Clinton anywhere up from three to five points.  Now, in every case the Hillary win is within the margin of error.  They don't make a big point of telling you that.  My point is I think the polls are still being used as weapons and that's a departure from my previously stated theories and beliefs.  And I finally asked myself, I mean, if we don't trust the news every day from these people, why would we trust their polls?

Early Voting a Poor Predictor of Final Results.  As we wind down this election, we begin to hear the familiar chime:  The election is over and/or can be predicted because of what we see in the early vote.  Don't buy it.  While we might be able to make some broad projections based upon early voting — maybe — we're more likely to substitute our own judgments and arbitrary intuitions for actual results.  There are (at least) three reasons this it true. [...]

Trump Leads in Average of National Polls Released Tuesday.  Four national tracking polls have been released so far Tuesday [11/1/2016].  Average them out, and you get a one-point lead for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.  Mrs. Clinton has crashed in the ABC/Washington Post poll, which just last week had her up by 12 points but which today shows a one-point lead for Trump. [...] Other interesting polls released today come out of Virginia, which was supposed to be a lock for Hillary Clinton.  A Washington Post poll has her up by six, while an Emerson University survey puts Clinton's margin at only four points.  But a Franklin & Marshall poll has Clinton leading by 11 points in Pennsylvania.

Now it's Clinton saying the polls are rigged.  Hillary Clinton's campaign is claiming 'bad polling' is responsible for the candidate's sudden fall from grace in a daily tracking survey she's lead since May, not her emails.  A senior campaign official told reporters traveling with Clinton today an ABC News/Washington Post poll that gave Donald Trump a one-point advantage was wrong.  'It's just not what we see at all.  It's not what other people seem to have.  There just seems to be something about that model that seems off,' the aide said.

Poll: Donald Trump +7 over Hillary Clinton in North Carolina, Now at 51 Percent.  A new WRAL/SurveyUSA poll shows that Donald Trump is now leading North Carolina by seven points ahead of Hillary Clinton — 51 percent to Clinton's 44 percent.  That means that Trump has shockingly flipped his numbers in the state in just one month.

The Stretch Drive (6).  [T]he ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll today [11/1/2016] has Trump leading by 1 point.  Yes, yes, margin of error, mumble mumble — but there's no avoiding the obvious fact that Hillary's once large lead has evaporated.  The state-by-state polls showing Hillary still ahead should be viewed with skepticism.

Trump Leads Clinton by 1 Point in New Poll as Enthusiasm Declines.  In the latest results, 46 percent of likely voters support Trump, and 45 percent are for Clinton.  With the data taken to a decimal place for illustrative purposes, a mere 0.7 of a percentage point divides them.  Third-party candidate Gary Johnson has 3 percent, a new low; Jill Stein, 2 percent.

Clinton tanked before Comey's surprise.  Hillary Clinton's campaign was floundering before the FBI announced on Friday that federal agents are back to investigating her for breaking the law as secretary of State.  Readers may recall that on Wednesday I noticed a 4-point drop in Hillary's lead in the ABC tracking poll.  The next day it dropped another two points.  Then it dropped to 4 and now it is at a two-point lead for Hillary.  That is a ten-point drop in four days — before Friday's news.

ABC News/Washington Post Tracking Poll:  Ten Point Swing For Donald Trump In Four Days.  Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump is rising in the polls, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.  Trump is now at 45 percent with likely voters, up seven points from his low of 38 percent earlier in the month.  Hillary Clinton is at 47 percent while Gary Johnson is at four percent and Jill Stein is at two percent.

The Visual Guide to Disputing Media Polling.  The purpose of this article is to prove that the media is either lying to massively impact motivation or turnout for Trump or has absolutely no idea what the actual score is.  The media don't care if I know what they are doing with their nonstop analysis of new "chaos" within the Trump campaign.  They are playing this sad song for the record number of independent voters who appear to be requesting ballots or voting early in battlegrounds across America.  The first clue is that in the same week, ABC and CNN have polls showing a massive lead and a comfortable lead, respectively.  These two polls are seven points apart.  Obama's landslide win from 2008 was by a margin of 7.6%, and he still lost 22 states.

L.A. Times Tracking Poll:  Donald Trump Leading Hillary Clinton Again.  Donald Trump's polling numbers are ticking back up, according to the latest L.A. Times tracking poll.  Trump is now at 45.8 percent nationally in the poll, while Hillary Clinton is 44.5 percent, per the Times' website.  However, the sponsor of the poll — the Center for Economic and Social Research — seems to have interpreted the data differently and shows Trump with a slightly larger lead:  45.8 percent to Clinton's 44.1.

Poll: Hillary Clinton's Lead Shrinking in Michigan.  Hillary Clinton is maintaining a six to seven point lead over Donald Trump in Michigan, according to two new polls — but her lead has shrunk since earlier in the month when she held an 11 point advantage.  A Free Press/WXYZ-TV poll reveals Clinton with a seven point lead over Trump, 41 percent to 34 percent.  Earlier this month, Clinton topped Trump in Michigan by roughly 11 points.

Democratic 'oversampling' is a dirty trick.  Without random sampling, the fundamental math basis of statistics goes kablooey.  Oversampling one side or the other is an invitation to make false conclusions, and any decent scientist or statistician avoids biased sampling like the Black Plague.  No scientific journal in the world would accept an article based on biased sampling.  Like so many Demo-mafia tactics, this one counts on voter laziness.  The Media Apparatus understands perfectly well that a single big headline, "Hillary ahead by 15 points," sways more votes than a thousand statistical details down in the small print.  Radio and TV talking heads only read the headlines.  They've never learned anything else, and they care too much about their hairdos.

Trump Has 2-Point Edge in Bloomberg Politics Poll of Florida.  Donald Trump has a slim advantage in Florida as critical independent voters narrowly break his way in the must-win battleground state, a Bloomberg Politics poll shows.  The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton's 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found.  In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton's 45 percent.

Democrats' push-polling strategy revealed by WikiLeaks.  Donald Trump is publicly accusing Hillary of "rigging the system."  Push-polling is one way to do that.  It amounts to artificially blowing up the Democratic poll numbers to "push" a psy-ops mission — to encourage one set of voters to think they are winning and to demoralize the opposition voters, who think they are losing.  One Alinsky rule is to do what your supporters enjoy:  winning feels better than losing.

Trump:  Media pushing fake polls to supress turnout.  With just two weeks before Election Day and suffering a five to six-point deficit in the polling averages, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is lashing out at both the media and pollsters, claiming that the majority of surveys being conducted are rigged in favor of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.  Speaking at a round-table event with farmers in Florida on Monday, Trump dismissed claims he is losing to Clinton, arguing that the media was using "phony polls" and downplaying those polls which show Trump tied or leading.  Trump is currently trailing the former Secretary of State by 5% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls in a four-way race.  Only two polls — the Investor's Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll and Rasmussen Reports tracking poll — have shown Trump in the lead over the past week.

Texas Rigged?  Reports Of Voting Machines Switching Votes To Hillary In Texas.  [Scroll down]  Obviously, the desired effect of such actions isn't to create a warm and fuzzy feeling for the Hillary campaign over polling data that they know is false.  Rather, the intent is to use artificial polls, like the ABC / WaPo poll released over the weekend showing a ridiculous 12-point national lead for Hillary, to suppress the republican vote by convincing opposition voters that the race is already over.  Of course, another way that democrats have attempted to "maximize what they get out of their media" this election cycle is by combining rigged polling data with reports from liberal newspapers, like this one from the Washington Post, suggesting that the election is such a blowout that typical republican strongholds, like Texas, are actually in play.

November 8th: Trump +5.  Presidential polls are split into two camps:  MSM polls and non-MSM polls.  They have starkly different characteristics and results.  MSM polls come from those you already know, and the companies themselves have already shed their last shred of dignity and objectivity to throw in with Hillary.  They also poll in discreet measure (i.e., release a poll whenever they want one to come out).  Non-MSM polls are not as well known but quite accomplished (e.g., Rasmussen, LA Times/USC, IDB/TIPP — the most accurate in 2012 election, by the way).  They also poll daily (actually an average of the last three days).  Finally, MSM polls consistently show Hillary up by an average of 8%, whereas the non-MSM polls have shown variation based on events and a logical current tightening of the polls down to basically +/-1% or so per candidate (e.g., Trump in the lead right now by 2% in Rasmussen's poll).

Trump Expands Lead in Most Accurate Poll Over Last Three Presidential Election Cycles.  Donald Trump expanded his lead over Hillary Clinton in a four-way race to two points, 42%-40%, in day 4 of the IBD/TIPP presidential tracking poll, with Trump moving past his Democratic rival in a head-to-head match-up for the first time.

Trump, Clinton In Dead Heat As Race Hits Final Two-Week Stretch — IBD/TIPP Poll.  With the presidential election set to enter its final two weeks, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump find themselves in a near dead heat at 41% each in a four-way race, the latest IBD/TIPP presidential tracking poll shows.  Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson edged up to 8% from 7%, while the Green Party's Jill Stein rebounded to 4% from 3%.  Without rounding, Trump stands at 41.1%, 0.1 percentage point behind Clinton's 41.2%. Johnson stands at 7.7%, unrounded, while Stein is at 3.7%.

Texas could destroy the United States.  The state department is conceding things in negotiations with other countries to influence the outcome of the presidential election.  Thousands of illegal voter registrations have occurred in places like Indiana and Virginia.  There are millions of dead people on voter rolls and registered in multiple states — and voter fraud is relatively easy to detect.  Electoral fraud — the fraud that takes place during the counting process — is even more difficult for those on the outside to trace and definitively track.  With wildly divergent polls providing cover, an professional media backing Hillary more overwhelmingly than self-identified Democrats are, and a bipartisan political apparatus that demands Trump lose, even the discovery of blatant irregularities and outright fraud won't reverse a Hillary win if it occurs.

What's going on with the polls?  Something funny is happening in the major national polling department of this presidential race, and no one's talking about it.  First, somehow the narrative seems to be developing that the polls show Clinton with a near insurmountable lead. [...] There is a very large gap between Trump's and Clinton's current national standing, as revealed by Goebbels/Pravda (CBS, NBC, ABC/Washington Post), on the one hand, versus the picture painted by three respected polling organizations that are not part of the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party, on the other.

Dueling Polls:  Clinton Lead Drops to 5 in One Michigan Survey, Increases to 13 in Another.  Hillary Clinton's lead over Donald Trump in Michigan dropped to five points in one Michigan poll, while it increased to thirteen points in another poll.  A statewide poll conducted by the Marketing Resource Group showed "Hillary Clinton continues to lead Donald Trump by five percentage points (41 percent — 36 percent) in Michigan as the campaign for President enters the final few weeks of the election.  The statewide poll, conducted by Marketing Resource Group (MRG), showed the number of undecided voters has been reduced to just eight percent."

Poll known for accuracy finds Clinton, Trump locked in dead heat.  An independent daily tracking survey billed as nation's most accurate shows Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton knotted in a dead heat even as other polls show her leading the presidential race.  The Investor's Business Daily poll, known as IBD/TIPP, released Monday found the top two candidates deadlocked at 41 percent, followed by Libertarian Gary Johnson at 8 percent and Green Party nominee Jill Stein at 4 percent.  What's more, since Oct. 20, the survey has shown Mr. Trump running slightly ahead of Mrs. Clinton.  He led Mrs. Clinton on Sunday by 43 to 41 percent, a marked difference from the Real Clear Politics average, which had Mrs. Clinton ahead by six percentage points.

New Poll Finds Hillary Clinton Leading Donald Trump by 12 Points.  Hillary Clinton has jumped into a double-digit lead against rival Donald Trump, pushed largely by disapproval of the Republican candidate, according to ABC News's inaugural 2016 election tracking poll.  The Democratic nominee now leads Trump by 12 percentage points among likely voters.

On the very same day:
Trump Up 2 Points Nationwide, While Clinton Campaigns As If The Race Is Already Won.  With 16 days to go until November 8, Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 2 percentage points — 43% to 41% — in a four-way race, according to the latest IBD/TIPP presidential tracking poll.  Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson saw his support held steady at 7%, while the Green Party's Jill Stein dipped to 3%.  Unrounded, Trump leads 42.6% to 40.8% — a 1.8-point edge — with Johnson at 7.2% and Stein at 3.3%.  Trump also holds a nearly one-point lead in a two-way matchup — 43.2% to 42.3%.

Trump Expands Lead Over Clinton To 2 Points — IBD/TIPP Poll.  Donald Trump expanded his lead over Hillary Clinton in a four-way race to two points, 42%-40%, in day 4 of the IBD/TIPP presidential tracking poll, with Trump moving past his Democratic rival in a head-to-head match-up for the first time.  Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson fell 1 point to 7%, while Green Party [candidate] Jill Stein held at 4%.  In the first three days of the tracking poll, Trump held a 1-point lead in a four-way race.  Unrounded, Trump leads 42.1% to 39.7% — a 2.4-point edge — with Johnson at 7.3% and Stein at 3.6%.  Meanwhile, in a 2-way race, Trump leads Clinton by a half-point — 42.2% to 41.7%.  Previously, Clinton had led by two or three points in a 2-way race vs. Trump.

The media thinks the American people are mushrooms.  The Los Angeles Times poll for six months calls the same people over and over again to see how the race is going.  That is expensive.  The other polls do it on the cheap, randomly call different voters each day, because that is what the textbook says you should do.  Who got it right in 2012?  The Los Angeles Times poll has it tied.  The rest of the polls have her up by more than six (on average).

Anti-Gaslighting: Raw and Current State Vote Data Not Remotely Close To Media Polling.  Earlier today on CNN Clinton Campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon stated:  "in the next three weeks we expect the polls to tighten significantly". [...] The reason for Fallon's prediction is brutally obvious, the current media polls are nonsense.  As a result, the polling averages are nonsense.  As a result the electoral maps the media want to sell today — based on those polls — are nonsense....  In essence, the same bias media coverage is embedded in their biased media polls.

Busted!  Hillary's Fake +11 Poll Lead Just Exposed By Anonymous.  Anonymous validates our suspicion of fake polls.  [Video clip]

Eight More Days Remain In Current MSM Narrative Cycle.  The peak U.S. media false polling cycle is thankfully in the rear-view mirror.  Over the next eight days corporate media entities will begin scaling back the promoted pro-Clinton polling advantages they have falsely inserted into the presidential election narrative.  By Friday October 28th, their manipulative cycle will have concluded.

America's Leading Motivation Expert Explains Why Hillary Polls are Bogus.  Polls showing Hillary are "up" are unreliable, because they do not reflect the lack of enthusiasm people supporting Hillary have.  A poll is like a New Years Resolution.  Yes, people will tell you they are going to do all sorts of things — lose weight, save more money, read more books, and vote for Hillary Clinton.  The reason most people never take action is because they lack motivation.  They can't see why their lives will improve if they take action.  There's no motivation.

Political science professor says pollsters have no idea who will vote in November.  A casual observer of national polling on the White House race might conclude that Hillary Clinton is the assured victor.  All but four of the surveys taken since the first general election debate that are included on industry website Real Clear Politics have Clinton winning head-to-head match-ups against Donald Trump.  She leads him by an average of 5.5 percent in recent surveys.  When Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein are options, Clinton is still ahead by 6.3 percent.

Are Polling Firms Now Factoring in Democratic Voter Fraud?  Trump supporters have repeatedly questioned not just the findings, but the motives of pollsters.  Earlier this week, Thomas Lifson expressed skepticism about a Hart Research Associates poll showing Donald Trump down by 11 points.  As Conservative Treehouse revealed, the organization has been a big contributor to Hillary Clinton, handing over $220,500 in September alone.  But Hart is not taken seriously by those who follow the polling industry.  Peter Hart is always identified as a "Democratic pollster," and Nate Silver, in his detailed analysis of the 2012 presidential race, didn't bother looking at Hart's data.

Pence: 'There's Something Missing in the Polling These Days'.  Friday [10/14/2016] on Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends," Republican vice-presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN) questioned the accuracy of polling, which shows his running mater Donald Trump behind against his opponent Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.  Pence pointed to the attendance of Trump's rallies and said that suggests something different is going on that isn't reflected by the polls.

The Savvy Person's Guide to Reading the Latest Polls.  When a poll comes out, I start by looking at the topline results — Hillary Clinton is plus 3 percentage points, or Donald J. Trump is plus 1, for example.  But it's also worth looking at vote share — whether Mrs. Clinton has 47 percent or 40 percent, for instance.  In particular, I care about how close the leading candidate is to 50 percent.  There's more uncertainty the further a candidate is from 50 percent and the larger the number of undecided voters.  Until a candidate approaches 50 percent, it's hard to know whether the lead is because of party unity or because the candidate has won over the key voters needed for victory.

Illegal In-Kind Campaigning?  Poll Fraud.  You know about that nice NBC/WSJ "poll" that shows that Hillary is up 11, right?  Well, CTH [Conservative Treehouse] deconstructed it. [...] What CTH managed to find is that the organization that ran the poll is an organization run by a man who currently is a SuperPAC operator for PrioritiesUSA in support of Hillary Clinton, and was involved in a similar one for President Obama.  In other words the so-called "media poll" wasn't actually run by NBC and the WSJ, it was run by a SuperPAC dedicated to Hillary's election.  The reason for the intentional bias in the poll's sample is now obvious — and ought to have been reason enough for both NBC and the Wall Street Journal to refuse to run it at all.

Clinton widens lead in Democrat-heavy NBC-WSJ poll.  [Scroll down]  Another factor introducing possible bias in polls, according to our expert, is the types of questions asked and they way they are asked.  For example, respondents in the WSJ-NBC News poll were queried about Trump's "vulgar" comments.  But it appears they were not asked about any negative Clinton developments, such as Wikileaks emails showing that, in paid speeches, she privately told Wall Street types that she has a "private" position on issues and a different "public position," and used the phrase "open borders."

The 11-point lead for Hillary in WSJ-NBC poll sure looks like psy-ops.  The NeverTrumps got a huge boost when the first poll out after the infamous bawdy tapes showed an 11 point lead for Hillary a month before the election.  That is an insurmountable margin, we have been instructed. [...] The Mainstream media touted this poll endlessly.  Unless, of course, the poll was pure psy-ops.  Which, thanks to some research by Sundance of Conservative Treehouse, it now strongly resembles.

Media Polling Fully Exposed — About That NBC/WSJ Clinton +11 Point Poll.  You have probably seen the latest example of the media claiming a released presidential poll from NBC and The Wall Street Journal as an example of Hillary Clinton expanding to an 11 point lead in the weekend following the "controversial" leaked tape of Donald Trump.  The claim is complete and utter nonsense.  Here's the proof.

Half a Dozen News Sites Stop Polling Their Readers on Who Won the Presidential Debate.  Half a dozen news outlets skipped posting snap polls after the second 2016 presidential debate on Sunday — most likely because Donald Trump touted his dominance of their polls after the first debate in September.

If my candidate is behind, the poll must be biased.  As we close in on Election Day, polls tracking the horse race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are everywhere.  And as results are released, partisans and strategists work hard to discredit those in which their candidate does poorly and to emphasize those in which he or she is doing well.  Some make dubious attempts to "unskew" all the polls so that they favor a particular candidate.  At least some people apparently believe that surveys are biased against their side.

When You Hear the Margin of Error Is Plus or Minus 3 Percent, Think 7 Instead.  As anyone who follows election polling can tell you, when you survey 1,000 people, the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.  This roughly means that 95 percent of the time, the survey estimate should be within three percentage points of the true answer.  If 54 percent of people support Hillary Clinton, the survey estimate might be as high as 57 percent or as low as 51 percent, but it is unlikely to be 49 percent.  This truism of modern polling, heralded as one of the great success stories of statistics, is included in textbooks and taught in college classes, including our own.  But the real-world margin of error of election polls is not three percentage points.  It is about twice as big.

Lester "Candy" Holt Moderates a Completely Useless Debate.  Nobody Won.  America Lost.  I had a feeling when Lester "Candy" Holt, who was every bit as partisan and self injecting as Candy Crowley was 4 years ago, began by talking about 6 years of unprecedented job growth under Obama and Secretary Clinton that Trump was about to be ambushed.  And I was right.  But did this completely tilted "debate" change any minds?  Absolutely not.  But the polls will show Hillary with momentum and she will see a 6 to 8 point rise in her numbers over the next few days.  But fear not, the polls are not showing movement in Hillary's direction.  Not at all.  You see, for the past few days the pundits and news shows have been talking about Trump's rising numbers in the polls.  He has "come from behind" and the race is now tied.  But there really hasn't been much movement in the polls themselves, just in the mix of Republicans and Democrats sampled.  Can you say set up?

Very Good News For Donald Trump In North Carolina "Non-Media" Poll.  A Suffolk University "non-media" poll released today [9/8/2016] shows exceptionally good news for candidate Donald Trump in the quest to overcome the rigged system.  Unlike most media funded polls, the Suffolk poll is very extensive and provides full disclosure on all aspects of the construct allowing for comprehensive research, analysis and evaluation.  The general top line result shows Donald Trump winning with 44%, and Hillary Clinton 41%.  However, the fully disclosed methodology provides an even greater level of optimism.

Polls Show Gary Johnson Hurts Hillary More Than Trump — MSM Jump Into Action.  Poll after poll is showing presidential candidate Gary Johnson in the race hurts Hillary Clinton more than Donald Trump.  And you know what that means?  Yup, time for the MSM to wage a thermonuclear media operation against the guy.

Today's Hillary Clinton Tampa Rally -vs- Donald Trump Tampa Rally.  The media polls seem to be moving in a positive direction for Donald Trump, but that's not the whole story.  What's really going on is the media smoothing out the methodology and assumptions while trying to remain relevant.  Nothing more.  Polls don't swing 15± points every few weeks... it just doesn't happen.  As we have outlined for years, all "media polling" is fraught with the same ideological bias inherent in the publication and broadcasting of those media entities presenting their interpretation of their constructs.  Nothing more.

All mixed up:  One national poll has Hillary leading by 7 while another has the race tied.  Hillary Clinton is maintaining her lead over Donald Trump in a Monmouth University poll — though her edge has narrowed since the political conventions and another poll out Monday [8/29/2016] showed the race as tied.


Trump Obliterates Clinton's Lead In Latest Reuters Poll.  U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton leads her Republican rival Donald Trump by 5 percentage points among likely voters, down from a peak this month of 12 points, according to the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll released on Friday [8/26/2016].

Monmouth University Pollster Patrick Murray Busted Manipulating Poll Data, then Lying About It.  By now most CTH readers are familiar with the more notoriously biased polling manipulators.  One of those is Patrick Murray from Monmouth University. [...] Today [8/22/2016], Monmouth via Patrick Murray presents a presidential poll of Ohio voters.  The actual raw data showed Donald Trump with a lead in the result; however, Murray changed the data through weighting to show Hillary Clinton with a lead.

CBS News Deletes Poll Story Crediting Trump for 5+ Point Lead in Pennsylvania.  True Pundit is issuing an Amber Alert for a missing CBS News story.  The story was short, weighed very positive for Donald Trump, was last seen at a CBS affiliate website, and vanished early Monday morning [8/22/2016], approximately 3 am EST.  Voters with any information on this story's whereabouts are encouraged to be quiet and act like nothing happened, just like CBS who is refusing to comment on our questions of what happened to the Trump poll story.  I mean, if the poll showed Hillary Clinton leading by +5 chances are there wouldn't be a story on a missing story.

Poll swings
Media Manipulation of U.S. Politics Under Increased Scrutiny.  It's all nonsense.  All of it.  Polls don't swing back-and-forth 15, 20, 30 points +/- every few weeks.  Regardless of how much the media wants to sell this reality, it just doesn't happen.

LA Times Poll Narrative Ignores Finding: 10-Point Black Voter Shift to Trump.  The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times "Daybreak" poll released Thursday had a stunning finding:  Donald Trump's support among African-Americans had increased by over 10 points virtually overnight.

Clinton lead over Trump shrinks to margin-of-error:  Bloomberg poll.  Is Hillary Clinton squashing Donald Trump into oblivion in the polls?  Or is her lead over him perilously shrinking?  One thing we know is: there are countless ways to spin a poll.  Consider the case of selective reporting on the most recent Bloomberg national poll.  On Aug. 10, Bloomberg reported "Clinton up 6 on Trump in Two Way Race."  But looking at the actual poll, Trump has moved so close to Clinton, the results are within the margin of error.

Media Photoshops Crowd Image For Hillary Clinton St.  Petersburg, Florida Speech.  A couple of hundred people showed up [door count puts the number at 171] within a St.  Petersburg venue capable of holding in excess of 4,000 without seating.  But the media, well, in the land of make believe, they just can't help but manufacture the optics because the same media are selling an entirely different story with their polling.

Pat Caddell on 'Cooked' Reuters Poll: 'Never in My Life Have I Seen a News Organization Do Something So Dishonest'.  On Sunday's Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, political strategist Pat Caddell outlined his charge that Reuters tampered with its own daily tracking poll to manufacture a sudden surge for Hillary Clinton.  "They not only changed their formula, to put Hillary ahead.  They went back and changed the results, for a week of results where Trump was ahead, and then they turned those into Hillary leads," said Caddell.  "They also erased all the former polling off the site.  They didn't tweak their procedure — they cooked it."

North Carolina Poll — Donald Trump Gains 32% of Black Voters — Leads 46/42 Overall.  A post convention scientific (non media) poll of North Carolina voters from The Civitas Institute shows candidate Donald Trump with a 46/42 lead over Hillary Clinton.  Also, in what is becoming an increasing concern for the Clinton campaign team — the demographics (crosstabs) of the poll show Trump is capturing 32% of the black voting base.

New Polls Signal Deep Trouble for Republican Nominee.  A raft of new national and battleground-state polls released Thursday found Donald Trump slipping well behind Hillary Clinton one week after the end of the Democratic convention, and as the Republican nominee reels from a public feud with the parents of a slain Muslim American soldier.  "There has clearly been a significant movement toward Clinton in the last week," said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and polling analyst for Bloomberg Politics.  "Some of it is a Clinton post-convention bounce, but more of it seems to be a Trump deflation or implosion."

Cook Political:  The 2016 Race Is Not Over.  [Scroll down]  Another thing we know:  the push polls, the agenda-driven media, and the exhortations of the Beltway insiders on both sides of the aisle are completely ignored by the dirt people in flyover country.  Just as Brexit caught the world's foremost economics "experts" and pollsters by surprise, so too could America's serfs rebel against everything K Street and Wall Street are trying to sell them.

Clinton Media Polling — CNN: "Now She's So Far Ahead There's No Need for an Election".  National Media Polls now show Secretary Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by 10 to 15 points.  And right on cue, the CNN punditry (Erin Burnett) begin tonight [8/4/2016] by saying:  ..."with a national lead this large is there really any reason to have the election?"

Reuters Announces Poll Changes To Help Lift Hillary Clinton.  After Reuters polling showed a 17 point (two week) swing to benefit Donald Trump something urgently needed to be changed.

Exclusive: Pat Caddell Blasts Reuters' Back-Rigging Polls to Show Clinton Winning.  Speaking exclusively to Breitbart News, political polling pioneer Pat Caddell said the Reuters news service was guilty of an unprecedented act of professional malpractice after it announced Friday it has dropped the "Neither" option from their presidential campaign tracking polls and then went back and reconfigured previously released polls to present different results with a reinterpretation of the "Neither" responses in those polls.  "This comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results," said the legendary pollster and political consultant.  "I suppose you can get away with it in polling because there are no laws.  But, if this was accounting, they would put them in jail."

75 Percent Positive Response to Donald Trump Speech — So CNN Trashes Its Own Poll.  Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in Cleveland during a momentous week in political history.  On Thursday night [7/21/2016], Trump gave a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute speech accepting the Republican nomination.  The speech was so overwhelmingly well-received among the crowd that the media did not know what to do to tear it apart.

Opinion Polls or Propaganda?  An opinion poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample, designed to represent the opinion of a larger population group.  The key word here is 'sample'. Suppose you want to conduct a survey on gun rights.  How might the results differ if you sample attendees at a Wyoming gun show versus a meeting of the Ithaca Code Pink chapter?  Presidential polls are no different.  The sample determines the poll results.  Ask a group of Americans who they prefer for president in November.  Who exactly is being asked?

The polls were not biased before the 2012 election, but they are now.  It is Donald J. Trump versus the world, and this makes the current round of polling different from previous elections.  Trump has certainly attracted the anger of Democrats, but many in the GOP establishment dislike him as much as — if not more than — their Democratic opponents.  And for this reason, we must be far more cautious in how the polling data is interpreted.  The GOP establishment (GOPe) — and its media outreach team at places such as National Review, the Wall Street Journal, etc. — is angling for influence with Trump, and its primary means of running this influence operation is by attempting to show that Trump's message and approach are failing with the public, and thus, he needs the GOPe in order to avoid an election apocalypse.

Evidence for massive liberal bias in Ipsos polling of the Trump vs.  Clinton match-up.  Stepping out of reality into the rapidly expanding landfill of polling data biased against Donald Trump reveals what a disaster is taking place when it comes to surveying the public's actual opinion — rather than the desired liberal narrative — about the 2016 general election. [...] The proverbial "tell" in these types of data sets is how respondents answered the question regarding their presidential vote in 2012.  If the poll is representative of the public, the relative percentages of Obama 2012 versus Romney 2012 voters surveyed should approximate — within reason — how the state in question actually voted in 2012.  But if there are significant deviations between the poll's composition and the 2012 results, the cause either needs to be fully explained by the pollster, or we default to the assumption of a bias.

After correcting for bias, Clinton's national lead in CBS News poll evaporates.  CBS News is now pushing the pro-Hillary Clinton polls in rapid fashion.  Late on Wednesday, this media outlet released the results of a national poll claiming to show that Clinton holds a 6% advantage over Donald Trump in the direct head-to-head matchup. [... But] this CBS News poll appears to be biased in favor of the Democrats by the same margin that Clinton purportedly holds over Trump, meaning that if the bias is removed, so is Clinton's lead, and we have a statistical tie.

It Ain't Over Yet.  More than at any period before 2008, polling data has become the main barometer for determining the public's political leanings and from the beginning Trump has been leading here.  The question is, of course, how accurate are these polls?  Are only Republicans being polled or is the general public?  Who's paying for the polls?  What questions are being asked by the pollsters?  Can this data be manipulated by the media?  Of course it can.

Pollster Tries Really, Really Hard To Make GOP Seem Racist.  A newly-released poll conducted by Democrat-aligned Public Policy Polling (PPP) appears to have been deliberately designed to ferret out any possible racism among South Carolina's Republican voters.  But the attempt largely seems to have failed.  The poll released Tuesday [2/16/2016] asks 33 questions, and most of them are basic for just about any poll regarding presidential primaries.  Likely Republican primary voters were asked which GOP candidate they favored, how firm they were in their choice, how they viewed each candidate, and so forth.  But along with the normal questions were nine that dealt with religious or racial matters.

Pollster Frank Luntz Admits To Conflict of Interest With Rubio.  Pollster Frank Luntz acknowledges that he took money to help shape Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)'s political career, a fact that he did not disclose while praising Rubio on Fox News and on social media. [...] Luntz admitted to Breitbart News that he once accepted payment to work for Rubio.  "Yeah, nine years ago," Luntz admitted.  "Nine years ago."  Luntz defended the supposed impartiality of his post-debate focus groups.

Trump Poll Numbers May Be Vastly Inflated Due to Reality Show Name Recognition.  Two-and-one-half months before last week's Iowa Caucus, columnist S.A. Miller of The Washington Times noted what could be called "The Trump Effect" on poll numbers with an article entitled "Donald Trump seen unlikely to win in Iowa despite poll numbers": [...] The critical question that Miller and others have raised is the possibility that some poll respondents choose Trump based not upon policy positions but because they recognize his name.  In my non-scientific discussions with various registered voters, I have discovered a rather significant percentage who are unfamiliar with the name of any GOP candidate, except for that of Donald Trump.

Iowa's Biggest Loser? The Polls. Again.  If you recall, the polls blew the mid-term elections in 2014, the polls really blew the highly-publicized Virginia Senate race, the polls in Israel greatly under-estimated Benjamin Netanyahu's most recent victory, the polls completely whiffed on the conservative win in Britain, and now the polls have blown the Iowa Caucus.  On the GOP side, every recent poll out of Iowa showed Trump as the victor.  In the Real Clear Politics poll of polls, Trump was up by an average of +4.7 points.

Christie Reminds Stephanopoulos of His History as Dem 'Operative'.  An annoyed [Chris] Christie retorted, "I know that as a former operative, you're obsessed with the polls.  I know you are.  But I also know that when you working for Bill Clinton in 1992, everybody told him the night before the New Hampshire primary, he was going to be in single digits and was finished."  He continued, "And the next day, he came in second place and his campaign went on to win the nomination.

Iowa shows polling is slippery business, getting more so.  Most poll-takers took it on the chin when Donald Trump's lead in pre-election polls ended with a Ted Cruz victory at Monday's [2/1/2016] caucuses.

Can We Shoot All the Pollsters Now?  Metaphorically speaking, of course, but in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, and now 2016 the pollsters have steered political press coverage.  And in each of those years, the pollsters have seriously screwed up and gotten things wrong.  Again today in Iowa, networks poured in resources based on polls and newspapers set coverage based on polls.  Ted Cruz smashed the record for votes in an Iowa Caucus, beating the 2008 Mike Huckabee win, with a traditional ground game.  But the polling missed it.  The polling missed it big time.  Establishment Republicans as well fed a narrative to the media that was wrong.  Turnout was over 180,000, and pundits all said that would mean Donald Trump would win.  He did not.  Time and time again, the talking heads got it wrong.

Poll: Ten Percent of College-Grad Men Hide Support For Trump From Interviewers.  [Donald] Trump consistently gets a whopping 6 percent more supporters in online polls than in traditional telephone-polls — and that's a big margin in a race with a dozen contenders.  This discrepancy between online and live interview polls has baffled survey experts, because online polls have become quite accurate since previous presidential elections.  A new study detected a possible reason for the 6 percent difference:  college-graduate men are apparently reluctant to tell phone interviewers that they like Trump, but are more comfortable revealing their opinions via online polls.

How Polls Manipulate Voters, No Matter The Results.  A new Indianapolis Star poll, conducted with Ball State University, shows 50.2 percent of people in Indiana support providing special nondiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Indiana's laws.  Reportedly, only 35.1 percent are opposed.  That is par for the course on LGBTQ issues, but vote results consistently invalidate such polls, which raises the question:  Is the purpose of polling data to convey the views of a representative sample or to engage in marketing tactics to sway views?

Can We Have a Word About the Polls?  Everyone today [12/14/2015] is freaking out about a poll from Monmouth University that purports to show Donald Trump getting 41% of the Republican vote.  There's a lot to note about exactly how garbage this poll is.  It is so bad that Monmouth's own polling director is basically disavowing it.  If you are interested in a relatively robust writeup of the methodological problems with the poll itself, which are primarily driven by the insane method Monmouth used to select their sample, you can check this Politico writeup [elsew]here.

NBC Promotes Agenda Driven Poll Result — AND, Yet Again, Hides The Data.  Against an increasingly obvious level of support for a common sense freeze on Muslim immigration the progressive apparatchik within the bowels of NBC/WSJ rush to the typeset to deflect the damage.  We've written extensively before about pollster Mark Murray, NBC, and their agenda-polling promotion, so there's no reason to re-hash that again.  However, the latest attempt is so far beyond absurd the light from where absurd emanates won't catch it for a year.

Don't Buy Trump's Big Lead.  When you examine the poll, which was taken from Nov. 27 through Dec. 1, 2015 (which was a holiday weekend and is problematical all by itself in terms of who the respondents were), it is clear that the pollsters chose to ask five questions on the topic of illegal immigration prior to asking about the Republican nomination horserace.  This is a bad polling practice that can skew the results.

The Obama Polling Disconnect.  There continues to be, in short, a gap between opinions about Obama's job performance and feelings about the country's direction.  This essay seeks to determine why nearly half of American adults frequently tell a pollster they approve of the job Obama is doing as president, but only about a quarter opine that the nation is headed in the right direction.

The Front-Runner Fallacy.  Early U.S. presidential polls have tended to be wildly off-target.  There's no reason to think this time is different.

How polling poisoned the political well.  Has political polling reached the end of the line?  While some won't find it as terribly shocking anymore, the polls in Kentucky which had previously been considered among the most reliable missed the Bevin win in the governor's race by a wide margin.  This wasn't the first time either.

Another Data Point to be Ignored.  Matt Bevin won Kentucky by EIGHT points.  It was not even close.  Every poll had it very close and many predicted the Democrats would win.  Kentucky is not alone.  Throughout the nation, polling has been incredibly flawed.  [In addition], it has been flawed internationally.  Look at the British election last year where no one saw the Tories getting an outright majority, which they did.  The polling was flawed in 2014.  It was flawed in 2012.  It was flawed in 2010.  Kentucky is just the latest example.  But even though we have another data point that the polling is flawed, the media is going to continue to shape its political coverage based on the polling.  The debate stages will still be set using polling.

Three Pinocchios:
Clinton's claim that 40 percent of guns are sold at gun shows and over the Internet.  So where does the 40 percent figure come from?  It is derived from studies that were based on data collected from a survey in 1994, the same year that the Brady Act requirements for background checks came into effect.  In fact, the questions concerned purchases dating as far back as 1991, and the Brady Act went into effect in early 1994 — meaning that some, if not many, of the guns were bought in a pre-Brady environment.  The survey sample was relatively small — just 251 people.  (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.)

The Biggest Scam of the 2016 Election.  Let's go ahead and state this right up front, because there's no other way to spin this.  Either the media and the Republican National Committee charged with overseeing the debate participation criteria are guilty of a negligence bordering on malfeasance, or they are conspiring together to gerrymander the outcome of the 2016 nomination.  How else do you explain the systemically flawed process of permitting public opinion polls, with questionable accuracy, to determine which candidates in a crowded field get access to a debate stage with over 20 million potential voters watching?  As well as how the air-time is doled out for those candidates who do qualify?

How the election revolution has arrived.  A political revolution is taking place in America.  The process of selecting party presidential candidates has been transformed in the last two or three election cycles.  Now we have the early debates designed to drive poll numbers and tell us who's "ahead" and who's "behind," who's "gaining" and who's "dropping."  Yet not a single vote has been taken, not a single voter has pulled a lever in a voting booth or gone to a single caucus.  And yet candidates are being winnowed out.  Take, for example, Scott Walker of Wisconsin.  Is he out because he couldn't get any voters to vote for him?  No, few voters have even bothered to focus on the race thus far with any intensity, much less actually vote.  It's because his debate performances proved lackluster, which sent his poll numbers down, which led to a sharp decline in his ability to raise money.  He lost in a contest that was extra-electoral.

Supposedly Neutral Federal Report Stacks The Deck Against Marijuana Legalization.  In 2012 Coloradans approved Amendment 64, which legalized marijuana for recreational use, by a vote of 55 percent to 45 percent.  Last February a Quinnipiac University poll found that 58 percent of Colorado voters supported that decision, while 38 percent opposed it and the rest weren't sure.  For prohibitionists determined to portray marijuana legalization in Colorado as a disaster, those poll results are inconvenient, since they indicate that public support for Amendment 64 was higher after more than a year of legal recreational sales and more than two years of legal possession and home cultivation than it was in 2012.  Honest drug warriors would acknowledge the Quinnipiac numbers and perhaps try to balance them with other poll results.  Dishonest drug warriors would do what the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (RMHIDTA) does in its new report on marijuana legalization:  change the numbers.

Why is CNN Hiding Its Poll Showing Deep Distrust on Iran Deal?  CNN did a poll on the Iran deal from September 4 to 8.  On Sunday morning [9/13/2015], CNN pollster Jennifer Agiesta (formerly of The Washington Post) reported the results — another poll showing deep skepticism about Iran, and the prospect that Iran will cheat on any nuclear deal.  Obama has a bad disapproval rating on Iran.  You'd never know this from all the "major victory for Obama" talk on this deal.

Rigging the Elections.  Does anybody really look into who's behind those ubiquitous yet influential polls?  It's a no-brainer to insist that we 'follow the money.'  Who is funding the various polls?  Who and where are they polling?  the general electorate or registered Republicans?  What questions are being asked?  I've never been polled.  Have you?

Goodbye, straw poll; you were fun but frivolous.  The Iowa Republican Party pulled the plug on the Iowa Straw Poll on Friday, but the party's official action merely confirmed the obvious:  The quadrennial caucus event was effectively brain dead.

There's No Proof Americans Want The Supreme Court To Save Obamacare.  According to a new [Washington Post]-ABC News poll, Americans oppose the Democrats' health-care insurance reform, 54 to 39 percent.  Yet, by a margin of 55-38 percent, more people say the court should not take action to block federal subsidies in states that didn't set up own exchanges.  This led the Michael Hiltziks of the world to declare that "Americans want to save Obamacare."  This seems like a contradictory message — until you discover how WaPo frames the question: [...]

Documents: Republicans In Congress Cook Up Phony Poll-Tested Talking Points To Push Obama Trade Deal.  [Scroll down]  A deeper dive into this particular poll, however, shows that the results obtained depend on the wording of the questions asked.  Neither Hughes' article nor Amenabear's article printed the actual question that was asked of respondents to get the still unimpressive 37 percent.  So to find it, anyone interested in knowing the full context of this data would need to go behind a paywall at the Wall Street Journal to get the full polling data.

Americans Support Nuclear Deal With Iran?  Presumably, hardly any of those telephoned by the pollsters realized that the objective of the agreement, assuming that Iran abides by it — a laughable assumption — is to extend the time it will take Iran to build a bomb to one year.  Even assuming that objective could be achieved, which most experts do not believe, it would be a small payoff for ending sanctions, which will entrench the mullahs' regime and increase the resources they can devote to nuclear enrichment and ICBM development, which will not be addressed in the prospective deal.

The Myth of Netanyahu's Racism.  Netanyahu's election comment about Arabs being bused in to vote has been seized on as a useful excuse to explain how the media's poll numbers that showed Netanyahu losing align with the actual results by claiming that a rash of racist Israelis rushed to vote.  But that fails to explain why the exit polls were still badly wrong.  A more realistic explanation is that the media's polling was biased against Netanyahu.  But it's easier for the media to accuse Netanyahu of racism than admit to its own biases.

Don't Believe the Latest Elizabeth Warren-Hillary Clinton Poll.  Like many seemingly crazy poll results, it comes down to methodology.  In this case, the Run Warren Run poll includes a string of ten leading questions that paint Warren in an exceedingly favorable light.

Absurd Polls That Favor Jeb Bush.  Jeb Bush is polling as the man to beat in 2016, and it's completely absurd.  Most people outside of Florida have little idea what Jeb Bush has done in office and even fewer voters know what he plans to propose or the direction he seeks for the Republican Party.  But in poll after poll, John Ellis Bush (J.E.B.), the privileged son of President G.H.W. Bush, brother of President G.W. Bush and grandson of a banker and Rockefeller-type Republican senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush, is leading the list of Republican nomination contenders by a wide margin.  So far though, he's the only one who has announced his desire to run for the office.

Republican Wave Drowns Pollsters.  Despite all of their supposed science, improved methodologies, and sophisticated turnout models, the nation's pollsters have just suffered through their worst midterm elections drubbing in 20 years.  The last time they were off this badly was when they woefully underestimated Republican gains in the Newt Gingrich "Contract with America" midterms of 1994.  In this year's U.S. Senate races, preelection "tossup" predictions really meant "comfortable Republican wins" in three instances — Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, where Republican victory margins were eight, nine, and 11 points, respectively.

Why the media, seduced by the polls, were stunned by huge Democratic defeat.  It's clear now that most prognosticators underestimated the depth of the Republican triumph in the midterms by slavishly hewing to the polls, some of which were wildly off the mark.  But as one Republican after another declared victory, there was another aspect to the coverage that struck me:  The focus remained solidly on the Democrats and why they had so badly blown the election.

Election results looked nothing like the polls — what gives?  Tuesday's midterm elections were supposed to be a night of nail-biters, from Sen. Mitch McConnell's re-election race in Kentucky to veteran Sen. Pat Roberts' battle in Kansas.  The too-close-to-call refrain was expected to be heard throughout the night.  Instead, when the dust settled, Republicans rumbled to one of their biggest victories in decades.  How could so many polls get so many races so wrong?

Losers.  Some polls seem to have transmogrified into pre-election partisan tools, given that a few Senate races and lots of governorships weren't even close to supposedly scientific predictions.

How did pollsters miss the Republican tsunami?  Republicans out-performed their poll numbers in race after race Tuesday [11/4/2014], raising questions about pro-Democratic bias in this year's election's polls — a major turnaround from the pro-GOP bias in 2012's polls.  The series of misses caused at least one political forecaster — Larry Sabato of the widely read Center for Politics' Crystal Ball — to call for changes to the industry Wednesday.  Sabato said on Fox News that he wanted an investigation of polls in Virginia that showed a double-digit lead for Democratic Sen. Mark Warner — who wound up winning re-election by less than a point.

The Polls Were Skewed, All Right — in Favor of Democrats.  As the 2014 midterm election wound to a close, left-wing pundits repeated the error of their conservative rivals in 2012, claiming that the polls forecasting doom were skewed.  It turns out that they were right — but in entirely the wrong direction.  As fivethirtyeight's numbers guru Nate Silver noted after midnight Wednesday [11/5/2014], the polls were skewed, on average, six points in favor of Democrats in the key Senate races where Republicans romped.

Is It As Close As That?  For most of 2012, I maintained that Mitt Romney would lose to Barack Obama. Only after President Obama's first debate did there seem to be a glimmer of hope.  After that debate, polling moved in Romney's direction.  Conservatives had hope.  As we now know, much of the polling in 2012 was wrong.  There were some great pollsters.  The IBD/TIPP poll, the Reuters/Ipsos poll, the Pew Poll, and others were spot on.  But many pollsters, including the most prominent pollster of all, Gallup, were left with black eyes.

Are Colorado Polls Underestimating Democratic Turnout?  Is it possible that pollsters are underestimating the size and composition of Colorado's electorate in the upcoming Nov. 4 — given that the state now mails ballots to its voters?  Democrats seeing incumbent Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., trailing in most public polls to Republican Cory Gardner certainly hope that's the case.

Skewed.  The political community has adopted polling averages or medians to correct somewhat for misleading surveys, and these averages are made widely available by websites such as Real Clear Politics and HuffPost Pollster, among others.  These aggregations are particularly useful when a new survey is released with results that buck the general polling trend in a race.

New Poll: Americans Oppose Obamacare's HHS Mandate 53% to 43%.  A new poll released Thursday [5/8/2014] shows that Americans oppose Obamacare's HHS mandate — the rule requiring "free" coverage of contraception, sterilizations, and the "week-after" pill that may kill human embryos — by a 10-point margin.  Polling on this issue has varied widely, depending on how pollsters frame the question.

The Polls Driving GOP Surrender Are Unscientific Garbage.  [Scroll down]  Conservatives should outnumber liberals by almost two-to-one, but the poll has the ratio at 34:23.  And people who claim not to have health insurance or health care coverage, which should be under 10% unless illegal aliens are included, constitute a whopping 16%.  Demographers might argue over these ratios, but as far as I can tell every case of apparent oversampling/undersampling favors the liberal or Democratic side.  Honest errors would tend to be more evenly distributed and would balance each other out.

About that NBC/WSJ Poll that Killed Republicans on the Shutdown...  This looks like a left-heavy sample.

Mark Levin: NBC/WSJ Poll Showing Shutdown Has Hurt Republicans A "Fraud".  ["]And you see folks, they all look at this poll, this NBC poll, and this has been all over FOX News today.  And unfortunately nobody there reads PJ Media or listens to talk radio or reads the internet, because the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is a fraud, an absolute fraud.["]

PPP sat on poll showing Colorado recall strength.  I'll have to defer to pollsters as to whether this is consistent with professional polling protocol.  PPP has admitted that it deliberately did not release a poll showing that Colorado State Senator Angela Giron was likely to lose the recall election by a wide margin.

Gallup Post Mortem Leads To Polling Changes.  Nearly seven months after President Obama won reelection by a margin of 4 percentage points, the Gallup Organization, the world's best-known polling firm, identified in a new report four main reasons why their 2012 surveys badly understated Obama's support.

Bloomberg News hid conflicting fiscal-cliff poll numbers, pushed results favorable to Obama.  A poll conducted last week by an Iowa-based firm showed Americans are conflicted about whether or not to support raising tax rates on wealthy Americans to avert the so-called "fiscal cliff."  But that's not how Bloomberg News, which commissioned the poll, reported the results Thursday [12/13/2012].

U.S. Main stream media duped on global warming polls.  In the past two weeks many U.S. media gave supportive coverage to two public opinion polls about global warming.  However, reporters were duped.  The surveys released on October 9th and 18th by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication were hopelessly biased.  They therefore cannot be meaningful measures of American public opinion.

Ready? Fire Ames!  Iowa governor Terry Branstad, a Republican, has suggested that the days of the Ames straw poll — the Midwest summer spectacle that takes the temperature of an idiosyncratic slice of the Republican party months before the first binding primaries — might be numbered.  "I think the straw poll has outlived its usefulness," Branstad told the Wall Street Journal.

PPP's polls were rigged all along.  New York Magazine was trying to be sympathetic to the popular polling figures on its own side of the political, but let out a secret in the process:  Public Policy Polling cooked the books all along.

A 59% pro-abortion turnout? I don't think so!  Remember that the exit poll methodology changed drastically this year:  they only polled in 31 states.  Of the 19 states (plus D.C.) that were dropped, there were three tiny 2008 Obama states (plus D.C.) with a total of 14 electoral votes between them, and the other sixteen were huge McCain 2008 states with 24% of the nation's population and 149 electoral votes, including Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee.  So, the "exit polls" weighted their sample by excluding 1/4 of the electorate.  More importantly, these polls explicitly exclude a cherry-picked, heavily Republican, pro-life-leaning 24%.

Fear and Loathing in Ohio.  [Scroll down]  One recent poll, showing Obama ahead by 6 points, had a survey sample composed of 38 percent Democrats and 29 percent Republicans — a D+9 oversample that actually exceeds the Democrat advantage in partisan ID reported by 2008 exit polls, when Ohio went to Obama by a 5-point margin, 52-47, over John McCain.  Such implausible oversampling of Democrats has become routine in polls this year.

It's Now Public: Editors Rejigger Polls.  The leading objection raised this year is to polls whose findings suggest a more Democratic turnout in states than is likely to be the case. [...] A stunning tale today in the Salt Lake Tribune, however, reveals the dirty little secret of polls paid for by the media.  The results are, in effect, owned by the media, and the media can insist that they be rejiggered.

A stunning admission on polling.  A significant section of America has chosen to disconnect from the media bubble.  They no longer buy newspapers or magazines.  They seldom watch network TV, especially the network news shows. [...] I suspect these people started to associate polling firms with their media clients some years back.  Now they just hang up on pollsters the same way they have turned their back to the media and entertainment industry.

Election Predictions from PJ Media Columnists.  For almost all of President Obama's term, polling has been more a media device to shape public opinion than a dispassionate barometer to report public opinion — reporting as "mainstream" the perceptions and programs of skewed samples.

CNN's latest poll deconstructed.  So, if Romney has 99 percent of the Republican vote, 5 percent of the Democratic vote (Obama comparably having only 1 percent of the Republican vote) and is ahead of Obama by a very impressive 22 percent among Independents, how can the race be tied?

Exit Polls Are Bunk; Ignore Them.  Take my advice and ignore exit polls.  Wait for real results.  Exit polls are media outlets or people they hire standing outside a polling place and asking people upon leaving who they voted for.

Brit Hume on presidential polling: 'There's something wrong here'.  On FNC's "Special Report" Monday night [11/5/2012], Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume said that many mainstream polls — which appear to indicate President Barack Obama will win a second term — may be fundamentally flawed.

Everything — Except the Polls — Points to a Romney Landslide.  The Drive-Bys are all excited by their own polling data. [...] You know, common sense tells me this election isn't gonna be close and shouldn't be.  And yet every poll, every single poll, has this race tied.

The Polls Are Wrong: Electorate is R+6.  While every single poll on the planet predicts Democrats will enjoy a turnout advantage of three to eleven points, the latest Rasmussen survey of party affiliation taken throughout October shows that Republicans enjoy a huge 5.8% Party ID advantage going into the 2012 election.

The Election Will Not Be Close.  The pollsters tell us that the election is too close to call, but that does not conform with reality.

Romney Gains 3 to Tie Obama in CNN's D+11 Poll.  [Scroll down]  Yet there is something odd — and even ridiculous — in the poll's sample:  of the 693 likely voters in the total sample of 1,010 adults polled, "41% described themselves as Democrats, 29% described themselves as Independents, and 30% described themselves as Republicans."  In other words, the poll is a D+11 outlier.

After This Election, Does PBS Deserve Public Funding?  Based on the reporting of several of its major contributors, one has to question PBS's objectivity during the current election.  On Oct. 25, PBS highlighted a TIME poll showing Obama leading Romney 49% to 45% in the key battleground state of Ohio.  Just four days later, the Cincinnati Enquirer showed the race tied, while the Rasmussen poll showed Romney ahead by 2 points.  On what basis did PBS select the TIME poll for its report?

Uncritically, Media Accepts Misleading Global Warming Poll.  Conducting surveys that measure real public opinion about global warming is difficult.  Because the hypothesis that humanity is causing dangerous warming is now loudly supported by most opinion leaders — media, educators, and government — and alternative viewpoints are condemned, most citizens are reluctant to express skepticism about the issue despite what they actually think.  The public will often give answers contrary to their opinions so as to conform to what they believe is socially acceptable concerning issues on which the politically correct position is clear.

D+7 PPP Iowa Poll: Obama Leading by One.  Public Policy Polling (PPP), the liberal polling outfit, conducted a D+7 poll this weekend that found President Barack Obama with a one-point lead over Mitt Romney (49%-48%) in Iowa.  Romney led by 8 points among independents.  On Friday [10/19/2012], PPP released an R+4 poll that had Romney leading by one, which means after an 11-point swing in its sample, Obama only gained 2 points in Iowa.

Brit Hume: On Average US Polls Are Weighted Seven Points For Obama.  FOX News analyst Brit Hume explains that the presidential polls this year give Obama on average a seven point advantage.

Investors' Business Daily Struggles to Prop Up Obama in Polls.  A walk through the RealClearPolitics average of polls is an exploration of parallel universes.  This morning, the overall RCP average shows a tied race between Obama and Romney.  While this itself is an ominous sign for Obama's chances at reelection, his actual standing is likely far weaker.  Propping him up are a gaggle of polls, led by Investors' Business Daily, that are clinging to fantasies about Democrat turnout.

Confused by all the polls? Pollsters explain the variation.  Even among polls conducted over the same span of time, different methodologies — whether it's differences in the way survey samples are chosen or differences in the way the surveys are conducted — can lead to different results.

Obama senior adviser questions polls.  "With all due respect to USA Today, they're running this flawed poll that has us tied with women, which is an impossibility," [David] Plouffe said, before turning to Gallup.  "Gallup has a terrible likely voter screen," he said.  "Gallup's been erratic all year.  Even when it's benefited us it's been way too high.  By the way, there's not that much movement.  There's very few undecided voters.  The USA Today thing ... they probably had a too-conservative skew amongst women voters."

Soledad O'Brien: Obama 'up 15' in Virginia.  This morning [10/18/2012], CNN's Soledad O'Brien told Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell "pre-debate polling shows that the president was up 15 points in the state of Virginia."  But O'Brien did not mention what the CNN Chyron, on the bottom of the screen, did:  The +15 points was among female voters, based on a Quinnipiac poll that had Obama leading Romney by 16 points (56-40) among women.

Obama camp attacks Gallup again.  President Obama's campaign once again attacked the methodology of Gallup just days after the polling group adjusted their methodology in a way that benefited the president.

Skewed Presidential Polls Should Be Trashed, Not Published.  With the public and the pundits hungry for more information about the election, the focus on polling seems to be greater than ever.  Unfortunately for the pollsters, so has skepticism about their results.  Part of that lies in the natural unwillingness of partisans to accept that their side is losing.  Thus, Republicans take polls that show their side winning as truthful while scoffing at those that show Democrats ahead; Democrats play the same game.

Nothing Like a D+9 National Sample to Cheer Up Obama.  So Obama is up three, as long as the party ID is two percentage points more favorable than it was in 2008.

WashPost Buries Its Tilted Sample, GOP 'Zeal' for Romney on A-4.  It's always wise to look inside the paper for the real news when The Washington Post reports on improving polls for Republicans.  The headline in Monday's [10/15/2012] paper is "GOP's zeal for Romney grows," but adds underneath "Race is still close after 1st debate; Poll shows little change among likely voters." [...] Only inside do you learn about how enthusiasm now for Mitt Romney doubles John McCain's at this point in 2008, and that the "virtual dead heat" touted in the first paragraph is matched in paragraph 17 with a 9-point Democrat sampling push.

WaPo Packs Dems Into Poll to Lift Obama.  This morning [10/15/2012], Washington Post & ABC released their latest poll of the presidential race.  Naturally, they find Obama leading Romney by 3 points, 49-46.  This is similar to their last poll, which found Obama leading by 2, 49-47.  Similar, but very, very different.  Their last poll had a D+3 sample.  Today, though, to keep Obama where he was, they had to juice the sample to D+9.

Daily Kos/SEIU Poll: Romney Beats Obama 50-46.  The left-leaning Public Policy Polling does regular weekly polling for the extreme left-leaning Daily Kos and SEIU, and the numbers this morning have probably stopped the hearts of leftists everywhere.

The Editor says...
Something tells me this poll is part of an effort to re-energize the disillusioned Democrat base.

America Won't Survive Another Four Years of Obama.  The Pew Institute's bombshell survey released this week showed that the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion rose from 15% in 2007 to almost 20% in 2011, and that the unaffiliated are much likelier to vote Democratic (63% of unaffiliated lean Democratic vs. 48% of all registered voters).  This prompted rejoicing in the liberal camp.

Irreligious people on the rise? Or just suspicious polling practices?  Once again, the Pew Foundation has brought forth a report on religion in America.  In the past they claimed that atheists know more about religion than religious people do, a conclusion not supported by their data.  This time the media headlines based on Pew's latest survey declare that the number of people with no religion is dramatically increasing.  The way the survey is being pitched by the media is that America is becoming less religious.

Five Reasons There Are Bad Polls.  This morning, CBS and the New York Times announced excitedly that their new swing-state poll (conducted by Quinnipiac University) in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey showed a substantial margin for Barack Obama in all three.  The problem:  The poll's results are preposterous.  We know this not because it shows Obama leading but because its "internals" are hilariously out of whack in relation to vote totals in 2008 and 2010.

Propaganda poll shows Obama ahead.  These results are as valuable as the media that sponsored them.  It is a shame that Quinnipiac, which was once respected, has thrown in with the propagandists.

Poll: Obama, Romney Tied in CO; Obama Underperforming.  [Scroll down]  Another poll released on Thursday [9/13/2012] had Obama leading by five points, but mainstream outlets, unlike local news organizations in Denver, failed to mention that the poll was conducted by a public affairs firm run by Democratic operatives who ran the campaigns of Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Mark Udall, both of whom are Democrats.

Yes, the media are massively biased towards Obama.  The Republicans aren't worried about Romney performing well in Wednesday's debate.  They're worried about how the mainstream media will choose to report it.

How 'The Shy Republican' Could Be Masking a Landslide.  At time of writing, polls show the race for the presidency to be tight. [...] Yet to many, especially those of us on the right, it seems peculiar that Obama is still remotely in the race.  With high unemployment, minimal GDP growth, a 100% increase in food stamp costs, and out-of-control spending, many conservatives are asking how just under half of the American population can possibly want more of the same.

Washington Post Cooks Swing-State Poll For Obama.  My colleague, John Nolte, has already covered how absurd the Washington Post poll of voters in "swing states" was.  For the last few months, I have become convinced that the media is actively trying to use their polls to impact the Presidential election.  Not the pollsters per se, but the media sponsors who pay their tab.  They are active participants in the campaign.  The Washington Post confirmed that my suspicions were correct.  They are totally an in-kind contributor to the Obama campaign.

A pollster under oath.  In May, the pollster for Al Gore's presidential bid in 2000 and John Edwards's in 2004 and 2008, Harrison Hickman, took the stand in the federal criminal case against Edwards over alleged campaign finance violations stemming from payments to support Edwards's mistress.  Under oath, Hickman admitted that in the final weeks of Edwards's 2008 bid, Hickman cherry-picked public polls to make the candidate seem viable, promoted surveys that Hickman considered unreliable, and sent e-mails to campaign aides, Edwards supporters and reporters which argued that the former senator was still in the hunt — even though Hickman had already told Edwards privately that he had no real chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

We are the 91%.  The most important unnoted characteristic of telephone polls (on which most of the political journalism these days seems focused — instead of on the economy) is that 91% of people refuse to participate in them.  In other words, only 9% of the population is being heard in the polls.

Rigging the polls.  Major election surveys in the last few months have shown Mr. Obama either in the lead or tied for the win, despite an economic record of massive unemployment and astronomical debt.  With that kind of baggage, the current Oval Office occupant ought to be trailing by at least 10 points.  The disconnect between data and reality has spurred increasing analysis of the polls and polling methods generally.

Can the Democratic Psyops Boost Obama?  If it doesn't pass the smell test, it is probably not true.  We keep being told that Obama is leading, that the race is close at best, that voters have accepted a 'new normal' for unemployment, that the economy is improving, that the price of gas means nothing, that Romney is making fatal gaffes.  We were even told that the 9/11 attacks which left our ambassador to Libya dead made Romney look bad.  Every week is a good week for Obama and a bad week for Romney according to the media.  Now we're told that this week's polls are showing Obama creaming Romney in the swing states.

Skewed polls indicate Obama's in trouble — not Romney.  Certain media polls indicating Obama is ahead of Mitt Romney by as much as 10 to 12 points in swing states seem to spell disaster for Romney, but what they really say about the Obama campaign may just surprise you[.]  The absurdity of the skewed sample models in those polls is one thing, but what conservatives need to understand is that polls skewed to heavily favor Democrats logically point to one very important fact — Obama is in big trouble.

Introducing The New Polling Firm of Madoff, Marist, Quinnipiac and Ponzi.  The pollsters of 2012 just don't know who is going to win in November any more than did the pollsters of 1980 know that Ronald Reagan was headed towards a landslide in that late-breaking year.

Is there a Republican landslide coming in November?  It would be an election night to remember for Republicans and conservatives if the Romney/Ryan presidential ticket wins in a landslide, but nothing short of shock and awe for Democrats and their liberal media allies based on the latest polls.  Quick to sweep the historic Republican election landslide in 2010 and Scott Walker's big victory in Wisconsin's recall election under the rug, Democrats and the liberal media have been treating Obama's dismal record on the economy and foreign policy the same way they treated those elections — like they never happened.

NYT Buries Obama's Tanking Poll Numbers.  Did you know that this debate we've been having around abortion, contraception and other health care issues is hurting the GOP?  You may not know it, unless you read the New York Times. ... They buried Obama's falling poll numbers, while insisting the debate must be hurting the GOP, because that's what they wanted and thought it would do.

CBS: Obama Leads in Our D+13 Poll.  Virtually every [media poll] uses a polling sample that is so heavily-skewed towards Democrats that it distorts the actual state of the campaign.  Of course, that is a feature, not a bug of the polls.  The polls are specifically designed to drive a narrative that Obama is surging and Romney is struggling. [...] This election, it isn't so much about polling as propaganda.  The polls are simply a tool being used by the media to try to depress GOP turnout and give a powerful lift to Obama's obviously lackluster campaign.  The polls confirm that the media aren't really biased.  Rather, they are active players for the other team.

Obama Media begin the Faking of Obama Poll Numbers.  In order to sway the vast majority and growing number of Americans who have finally faced up to the fact that Obama is purposefully trying to destroy the United States of America, the Obama Media have begun their side of the Obama syndicate's overall strategy of lying to us.  Polls now show 50% of voters would vote for Obama.  Intelligent people — even those few on the Left — know this is a lie.

Is the Liberal Press Shooting Itself In the Foot?  Reporters have been trying to help Barack Obama limp across the finish line by creating a daily distraction to divert attention from the Obama administration's awful record.  Whenever possible, they have trumpeted the claim that Mitt Romney has committed one gaffe or another, that he is falling behind in the (bogus) polls, that his campaign is in disarray, and he is basically doomed.  No doubt this gives reporters and editors momentary satisfaction, and they have indeed convinced most people that Obama will likely win, but does that really advance the objective of re-electing Obama?

The day polling died.  [Scroll down]  Pollsters themselves, when challenged on their stats, say they're just presenting a snapshot of public opinion.  Fine, but these snapshots are wildly distorted.  The key hidden fact is that fewer than one in 10 respond to those who try to poll them.  People who screen their calls, hang up on people they don't know or end the survey because they don't have time to take it make up more than 90 percent of those phoned by pollsters.

CNN Is Just Making Up Poll Numbers Now.  First let me say, with less than three months to go in this campaign, can we please stop polling the political views of "adults", rather than "registered voters."  We really should be moving soon to a "likely voter" screen, but I'll take "registered voters" for now. Knowing the political views of unregistered voters is worthless at the height of an election campaign and serves no real purpose but to give the Democrats an advantage.

Washington Post joins Poll "Truthers".  [Scroll down]  So what does this mean?  It means that when you have a poll that closely reflects the actual GOP vs Dem split (within 1.4 points of it if you believe Rasmussen) you get a result that accurately reflects what is going on rather than a Democrat fantasy.  Much as I hate to give solace to Andrew Sullivan, public opinion didn't swing 12 points in a week, Pew simply took a sample that almost matches the American electorate and we are seeing what was already there, only more so.

WaPo Furthers Liberal Media's 'Racist' Narrative at RNC: 'Republican Party is White, Aging, & Dying Off'.  The liberal media can't seem to help themselves.  While counter-arguments are occasionally acknowledged, most journalists of the progressive persuasion are not interested in fair and balanced coverage of politics.  Facts and figures are seemingly subjective in the whole scheme of things.  Severely limited studies and polls seem to provide them with all the information they need.  Oh, and almost everything is racist.

As Predicted: Now That Obama Is Losing, Dems Play Mormon Card.  This is a scripted attack, which seems to be a "push poll" specifically targeted at Catholics registered as Republican, with the purpose of suppressing the pro-life vote for Mitt Romney.  Exactly how widespread it is or who is funding and directing it, we don't know.

NBC Uses D+11 Poll to Find Obama Up by 6.  Serious question:  Does NBC just think we are all idiots?  Have they been under a rock for the last decade and not realize that they no longer can control the information we hear?  Do they think they can breathlessly report that their latest poll has Barack Obama leading Romney by 6-points and not mention that they are using a D+11 sample?

Pollster pulls out of Fla., NC and Va., says Obama can't win there.  Suffolk University pollster David Paleologos, whose polls are aggregated into mainstream averages to show where the presidential race stands in the swing states, said he's finished polling in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia because President Obama has no shot of winning those states.

Did CBS lie about its Obamacare poll?  The CBS/New York Times poll shows that the public has warmed up slightly to Obamacare on its second anniversary.  Or does it.

Ron Paul supporters decry media neglect.  Ron Paul finished just 152 votes behind Michele Bachmann in the Ames Straw Poll, but from the headlines and TV news coverage, it's hard to tell he even showed up.

WaPo Fails to Publish Own Poll on ObamaCare's Lowest Popularity Ever.  A new ABC-Washington Post poll found ObamaCare sunk to its lowest popularity yet:  52 percent opposed, and only 43 percent in favor.  ABC mentioned the poll without fanfare at the end of a Jake Tapper report on Monday's World News [12/13/2010], and Tapper added this was the health law's "lowest level of popularity ever."  But Tuesday's Washington Post reported not one sentence on the poll in the paper — even as they reported in the paper that the same survey found Obama's tax-and-unemployment-compensation deal has "broad bipartisan support."

Misreading the new CBS poll.  The headlines throughout the mainstream media are trumpeting the latest CBS poll:  "71% of the country disapproves of the way the Republicans are handling the debt ceiling crisis."  The implication being that the Republicans are at fault because of their intransience and Obama is winning the PR battle.  However a more in depth look at the poll reveals a skewed, at usual, result.

CBS makes Herman Cain sit at the back of the poll.  Herman Cain has been doing well in the polls, but don't tell the Cracker Broadcasting System.  The DC's Alex Pappas reports: "CBS omitted Herman Cain's performance in a new Iowa poll of GOP presidential contenders despite his third place finish.  On Sunday's [6/26/2011] 'Face the Nation,' moderator Bob Schieffer correctly said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann finished first and second in the poll.  But then he passed over Cain, incorrectly saying Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich polled next after the two front-runners."  Either Bob Schieffer has forgotten how to count — a distinct possibility — or he just doesn't want to give Herman Cain any credit.

Why are Obama and the Press so Silent on Afghanistan?  The mainstream media basically downplayed or ignored a March 15 Washington Post/ABC News poll which showed American support for the Afghanistan war seriously eroding.  For the first time since the war there began almost a decade ago, nearly two of three surveyed said the battle is not worth fighting.  Normally, such a dramatic turn in public sentiment against a war would rate screaming headlines and endless speculation on how that might affect President Obama's political standing and re-election chances in 2012.

Skewed Public Sector Union Poll Ignores Reality.  While other polls have Democrats and Republicans roughly even in party identification, the Times/CBS poll gives Democrats a 10-percentage point edge.  Also, 20 percent of those questioned have a union member in their household and 25 percent have a government employee.  Those are considerably higher percentages of union members and government workers than actually exist in the country.  So the poll is slanted to begin with.

Sometimes in Polling, It's All in the Question.  What does the public think about the Bush administration's wiretapping program?  It depends on how you ask the question.  A half dozen polls on the issue have turned up different conclusions, and a key distinction appears to be the way pollsters identify the people who might have their emails and phone calls monitored as part of an effort to fight terrorism.  Recent poll questions have referred to "suspected terrorists," "people in the United States" and "American citizens."

MSNBC's Mitchell Touts Planned Parenthood Poll.  During Tuesday's [12/6/2010] 1PM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Andrea Mitchell highlighted a new poll from the left-wing pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood that claimed that voters do not trust Sarah Palin on so-called "women's health issues":  "A new poll suggests that she may have a tough time getting voters to trust her on at least one front...  54% of registered voters do not trust Palin on those issues."

Associated Press poll claims 60% Obama Approval.  Obama sycophants in the media, which means most of the media, have been trumpeting an Associated Press poll that purports a 60% approval rating for Barack Obama.  And if you believe that number, I have a compound in Abbottabad I'd like to sell you.  The AP reached the 60% figure by lumping the majority of 'Undecideds' into the Obama approval column.  Typically approval polls categorize respondents into three categories:  Approve; Disapprove; and Undecided.  Not the AP poll.

MSM Reports Wildly Flawed WI Exit Polls To Spin For Obama.  You should've seen the MSM last night on Twitter.  I make it a point to follow several of these folks in order to keep an eye on them, and the Wisconsin exit polls, released just after the state's polls closed at 8pm CT, showed the recall race between Republican Governor Scott Walker and his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, tied at 50/50.  And was the corrupt media giddy?  Oh yes they were.  Not only was the MSM giddy over the idea Walker might lose, but they then drip-drip-dripped all the internal numbers that spelled gloom and doom for our side.

Newsweek Poll: Too Many Democrats in the Sample.  This Newsweek poll released over the weekend [10/24/2010] found some surprisingly good news for Democrats.  But it probably doesn't mean much for President Obama and his party:  the sample includes too many Democrats, at least based on a lot of other recent polls.

Newsweek poll assumes lower GOP turnout than in 2008.  If you look at how each party does by the voters' partisan ID, and do the three-by-three equation ... you'll find their registered voter sample is weighted as follows:
  •   39 percent Democrat,
  •   29 percent Republican,
  •   32 percent independent.
They give different numbers at the end of their report, but this is how the poll is actually weighted, according to the math.

The New York Times May Want To Poll This Question.  It seems every day there is another example of media deception in America.  With the Fourth of July approaching, it is well worth remembering why the Founding Fathers gave the press special privileges.  They wanted journalists to report honestly, to give the folks accurate, unbiased information so they could make informed decisions about who should hold power.

New York Times Misrepresents Global Warming Surveys.  The New York Times on April 30 published a news article that leads off with the assertion, "polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk."  No such poll exists, but don't expect the New York Times to make a correction any time soon.  The only poll that resembles the Times' assertion was an online survey in which only 79 respondents listed themselves as having climate science as their primary area of expertise.  This is an absurdly small number of respondents -- even overlooking the less-than-scientific nature of the poll itself -- from which to draw meaningful conclusions.

Obama gets a boost after Gallup tweaks polling methodology.  President Obama's job approval rating spiked this month, according to Gallup's daily tracking survey, but the jump may be the result of a shift in the polling outlet's survey methodology.  Since late 2011, President Obama has held steady at just under 50 percent saying they approved of the job he was doing and just under 50 percent saying they disapproved.

Gallup Ignoring Its Own Big Stories.  The Gallup Poll is one of the oldest in polling organizations in America.  Its reputation ought to be important.  The articles which accompany Gallup's polls, however, seem calculated to hide the real story.

54 Percent Say the More They Learn About ObamaCare, the Less They Like It.
Washington Post Ignores its Own Poll Finding.  A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in the three days following President Barack Obama's speech to Congress about his health care plan discovered that 54% say the more the hear about the plan the less they like it.  This particular poll result was not mentioned anywhere in the story about the poll that was posted by the Washington Post on its Web site on Monday [9/14/2009].  The result did appear in the data sheet from the poll that was linked to the story.

Still the Biggest Missing Story in Politics.  In August of last year I wrote an article, "The Biggest Missing Story in Politics," which reviewed the single most important datum in the last thirteen Battleground Polls over a period stretching from early 2002 to late 2008.  The critical fact, completely ignored by almost everyone, was that in answering Question D3, which asked the respondent what he considered his ideology to be, sixty percent of the American people described themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative."

Conflicting interpretation of the same numbers:

Viewpoint 1:

Poll: Obama's approval rating sinks to new low.  President Obama's approval rating has hit the lowest level ever in CBS News polling, according to the latest CBS News/New York Times survey.  The drop may be partially attributable to rising gas prices.  Just 41 percent of Americans approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing as president, according to the poll, conducted from March 7 to 11.

At the same time...  Viewpoint 2:

Obama's Job Approval Rating Reaches 49% Over Weekend.  President Barack Obama's job approval rating rose to 49% in the three-day period from Friday through Sunday [3/11/2012], building on an upward trend that began the middle of last week.  Obama's current approval rating is the highest measured since early February, and before that the highest since June 2011.

President Obama's approval rating has either sunk to a new low or reached a new high, depending on which newspaper you read.

Election questions no one ever asks:  After each debate, some network would convene a focus group of undecided voters who then preened over their lofty status.  Pollster Frank Luntz, CNN's Soledad O'Brien or some other enabler would gush over how fascinating it was to talk to "real people." ... [But] These people are undecided because they don't do their homework.

The cell phone effect: about 1 percent.  The question of whether polls have systematic errors is a continuing one.  In the recent polling news is a Pew Center study that hits hard on the question of cell phone users.  According to the survey, failing to survey people who have cell phones but no landline leads to a net underestimate of Obama's support relative to McCain.  According to a previous Pew/AP survey, cell-onlys comprised nearly 13% of households at the end of 2006.  Cell-onlys prefer Obama over McCain by 18-19% (compared with an even split in the landline sample).

Attitude Polls — Servants or Masters?  The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3, Autumn, 1945.

The Bradley Effect.  The theory proposes that some voters will tell pollsters they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, while on election day they vote for the white candidate.  It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.  The Bradley effect theory posits that the inaccurate polls were skewed by the phenomenon of social desirability bias.

Bradley's Revenge.  If Barack Obama's re-election campaign ends in failure, you can expect to hear a lot about a man named Tom Bradley.

Does the Bradley Effect Overrate Obama in the Polls?  The Bradley Effect was observed in dozens of elections throughout the U.S. — from Virginia and North Carolina, to Illinois and California — for about 15 years.  It started with George Deukmejian's surprise win over Tom Bradley in 1982 and operated predictably in American elections until the mid-1990s.  Then it vanished.  Obama's victory in 2008 bore no traces of it.

The disappearing Bradley effect.  [Scroll down]  Now comes a large-scale empirical study (in preprint form) by Harvard political scientist Dan Hopkins.  He finds that since the mid-1990s, the Bradley effect has disappeared.  His paper is a must-read.

When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates.  The 2008 election renewed interest in the Wilder or Bradley effect, the gap between the share of survey respondents expressing support for a candidate and the candidate's vote share.  Using new data from 180 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect.

Clearing up this silly media bias business.  The new Rasmussen poll reports that this time 51% of likely voters now fully expect reporters to help the incumbent Democrat keep his office, while only 9% expect reporters to help the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Nine percent?  Really that much?  Other Rasmussen findings:  18% of likely voters, presumably deaf, blind and living in closets, can't make up their minds, while 22% absolutely expect unbiased coverage throughout the remaining national agony and bonanza for commercial TV stations.  Obviously, they only watch C-SPAN.

Americans still believe in one man, one woman.  For years, the mainstream media has done their level best to make the redefinition of marriage seem inevitable.  As if in concert, local, regional, and national outlets have published the results of poll after poll under headlines like "Majority of Americans Now Supports Same-Sex 'Marriage,'" all in an attempt to silence opposition and create an atmosphere wherein they can finally see the fabrication of same-sex "marriage" achieved.

Stunning results in early voting in California.  California has begun early voting already as well as mail-in balloting.  The number of people who have gone in to vote in person has been extensive.  The results so far prove what we had always suspected.  The polls are being proven as totally unreliable.

Oversampling Dems.  How important is it for polling organizations to include the correct proportions of self-identified Republicans and Democrats in their polls?  The short answer is:  Extremely.  In this hyper-partisan age, the partisan ratio can not only determine the poll's top-line results, but also shape the ensuing media interpretation of what it all "means."  That interpretation defines the expectations game, which, in turn, affects fundraising, voter enthusiasm, and turnout.

Deceptive Polling:  Polls are among the most telling expressions of bias in the media.  They are very often agenda-driven, used to make a political point, or to pile on a favorite target.  The most controversial and flawed poll that has been most cited in recent weeks has been the CBS News poll finding that President Bush's approval rating was down to 34%.  But another poll, purporting to find that U.S. troops are weary of the Iraq War or want a premature withdrawal, is also suspect.

Media Polls: Pimping for Obama?  Polls are manipulated in a number of ways, including question wording, the order in which questions are asked, and how respondents are chosen. ... Pollsters acknowledge that they are oversampling among three demographics that the Obama campaign is targeting:  young people, minorities and Democrats.

CNN Poll:  All Americans Are Racists.  For creating a story out of nothing and then finger pointing at US society and saying how evil it is, this Dec. 12th CNN story takes the cake.  In "Poll:  Most Americans see lingering racism — in others", not only is a somewhat leading poll cited as evidence that America is still rife with racism, but CNN uses comments emailed to them by their viewers as some sort of follow up proof for it!

NBC/WSJ Poll:  What The 'Today' Show Didn't Report.  These days, it is almost as telling what little gems media organizations choose to hide from the public about their own polls as what they share.  The release of the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is a fine example.

Pollster guilty of fake data conspiracy:  A polling company owner admitted participating in a conspiracy to falsify data in order to meet deadlines for clients.

Suspicious Surveys:  You can be sure that when the media release a poll tied to a major news event, it's often biased. … Take the ABC poll.  It was conducted from Aug. 17 to 24.  Yet for some reason it wasn't released until Sept. 10, the day Petraeus delivered his much-anticipated report on the surge.  We also wonder who actually conducted this poll on the ground in Iraq.  Hope they weren't the same local reporters and translators that U.S. newspapers and TV networks employ, many of whom have been found to be less than credible.

Media polls as instruments of propaganda.  The MSM's relentless propagation of Democrat-generated dezinformatsia has portrayed Operation Iraqi Freedom as a quagmire, the booming economy as an unjust bust and the President as a lawless spy and has even suggested that George Bush is at fault for high fuel prices.  All this certainly has taken its toll in the polls.  These polls become self-fulfilling when the MSM incessantly pushes a particular perspective, polls the indoctrinated masses in search of that perspective and then reports the results as "news."

Obama fails the race test.  A March 26 CNN poll showed that 73 percent of Americans think [George] Zimmerman should be arrested, and this trial by media brings to mind John P. Roche's observation that lynch mobs will claim to be highly democratic because there is only one dissenting voice.

The scandalmongering co-presidents:  To [the news media, President Bush is] the enemy, and he must be taken out.  And they're doing everything they can to make that happen, including rigging the polls against him by oversampling Democrats, and including nonvoters along with voters, to make him appear even less popular than he apparently is.

L.A. Times poll skewed.  Kerry, Bush survey sample was 38% Democrats, 25% Republicans

Ignoring the Pro-Pope Polls of Catholics:  ABC and The Washington Post downplayed their finding that 81 percent of U.S. Catholics approve of the selection of Pope Benedict XVI, and the other networks just ignored it.

Blatant Media Bias: CBS ignores its own poll showing support for a tax cut.

A 55-point chasm in military support for Kerry and Bush.  October 11 [2004] editions of Military Times publications (Navy Times, Army Times, Marine Corps Times, Air Force Times) carried an astounding story not likely to get much coverage in the establishment press.  Bush leads Democratic Sen. John Kerry 73 percent to 18 percent in the voluntary survey of 4,165 active-duty, National Guard, and reserve subscribers.


More information about "domestic spying" can be found here and here.

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Updated December 12, 2019.

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