Brian C. Joondeph:
“…Can President Trump overcome a 12-point deficit to Joe Biden? Aside from Biden’s failing cognition and mental acuity, as in “120 million Americans dead from the Chinese flu,” history may also provide an answer to that question.
Four years ago, June 15, 2016, CNN reported, “Hillary Clinton has a 12-point lead over Donald Trump nationally, a new Bloomberg Politics poll shows.” We know how that poll aged over the subsequent months. Is history repeating itself with another 12-point lead over Trump?
In unison was an ABC News/Washington Post poll two weeks later, also showing Clinton with a 12-point lead over Trump. This poll oversampled Democrats over Republicans by 36 to 24. What a coincidence, a 12-point difference in sampling and electoral preference. They got the poll result they wanted by fudging the sample.
Media delusion continued in mid-October 2016 when Newsweek confidently predicted, “Hillary Clinton on track for Electoral College landslide”, based on a Reuters/Ipsos poll. This poll was taken days after the Access Hollywood October surprise tape release which like everything else was designed to obliterate Trump’s campaign or presidency.
Is this déjà vu, the media believing the same polls as they did four years ago? Have they learned nothing? Especially knowing how Trump has foiled all other deep state and media attacks against him.
Rasmussen Reports publishes a daily presidential tracking poll of likely, not simply registered, voters. Trump and Obama are within a point or two of each other in total approval at the same points in their presidencies.
Remember that Obama was cruising to reelection with a gale force tailwind from the media and no resistance from tongue-tied Republicans while Trump faces a hurricane force media headwind and interestingly the same unhelpful Republican party, yet he is as popular at “The One” was at the same point in their respective terms.
Polling “wunderkind” Nate Silver agrees, saying that, “President Trump can absolutely win the 2020 presidential election despite his significant dip in the polls against former Vice President Joe Biden.”
It seems the media doesn’t understand polls, despite commissioning and paying big bucks for them. Polling registered rather than likely voters and oversampling Democrats skews the results. Are these polls designed to reflect public opinion or shape it? What is the purpose of these polls?…”
What is the purpose of these polls? Indeed that is the question. I believe the purpose of these early-cycle polls that oversample Democrats and that poll registered vs. likely voters is to shape public opinion, not measure public opinion. The polls are battlefield preparation by liberal media. They give Democrat-positive messages to the talking heads each night. The polls attempt to tamp down Republican enthusiasm and convince undecided or fence-sitting voters that Trump can’t win. We won’t see actual measurement of the voting population until the last few weeks of the election cycle. In 2016 the fantasy, early-cycle push-polls got the better of many pollsters and they left their models unadjusted heading into the final weeks of the election. Will they make that mistake in 2020?