The Media's Latest Poll Dance. With the left floundering, look for phony push polls
The Media's Latest Poll Dance
With the left floundering, look for its pols and media allies to release a slew of phony and push polls, the better to claim that President Trump is finished. Not buying it.
September 14, 2018
The Media's Latest Poll Dance
By Brian C. Joondeph
With the midterms less than two months away and the economy firing on all cylinders, the Democrats, and their handlers, also known as the American media, are entering the panic zone. The midterms are the last chance for the left to stop the Trump train.
Robert Mueller's investigation is shooting blanks. Mueller's Deep State cronies in the FBI and DOJ may be facing legal troubles of their own. Trump's popularity remains solid despite Hurricane Florence-strength media attacks against him each and every day.
CNN and MSNBC are currently at Category 4 hurricane strength against President Trump. Expect to see this ratchet up to Category 5 in the upcoming weeks before the midterms. Ninety percent of Trump's media coverage is negative. This will increase to approach 100 percent if Mueller can't find or fabricate the smoking gun that will send The Donald slinking back to Trump Tower.
Since Stormy Daniels's pole dances haven't damaged President Trump, big media are using their own "poll dance," specifically opinion polls, to create the narrative that no one likes the president. They hope to dispirit Trump voters, damping the enthusiasm of November 2016, to pick off enough House seats to shift House control to Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters.
At the least, these polls can further the media fable that everyone is embarrassed by Trump and won't support him, causing some of his supporters to abandon the president so their friends and families stop calling them racist, sexist Nazis.
The latest poll is a Quinnipiac University poll. CNN's Brian Stelter wasted no time in gleefully tweeting out the results.
In choreographed synchrony, worthy of Olympic synchronized swimming, MSNBC, dance partner of CNN, had its own tweet.
That's it, then. As prosecutor, judge, and jury, big media proclaimed Trump's presidency over. In other words, America is ready to Dump Trump.
Is that wishful thinking from the likes of Stelter and Scarborough? What if we look at the actual Quinnipiac poll that has them so excited?
One of the results is this: "American voters disapprove 54 - 38 percent of the job President Trump is doing." Doom and gloom for Team Trump.
They do acknowledge that "Trump's base remains loyal." But they can't help themselves taking a stereotypical and bigoted view of his supporters. "The only listed groups approving of the president are Republicans, 84 - 7 percent and white voters with no college degree, 51 - 40 percent."
Of course, Trump-supporters are dumb whites, rednecks with only two teeth playing a banjo on a porch swing in rural Georgia. Not the latte-drinking liberal elites in Manhattan or the cosmopolitan conservatives sipping chardonnay in Georgetown.
Their kicker question was, "Do you think Donald Trump is fit to serve as president, or not?" On Sept. 10, 2018, Quinnipiac found its answer – 41 percent yes, 55 percent no. That's it, then. Hillary should move into the White House next week, and Trump should be sent to the insane asylum.
One question they asked, which won't receive much attention for fear of upsetting many of the CNN and MSNBC news panelists, is this: "Do you think that President Trump is mentally stable, or not?" Lo and behold, even in this biased survey, 48 percent answered yes, he is mentally stable, 42 percent no. Obviously, they didn't conduct this poll in Hollywood where almost everyone believes that Trump is insane.
Several layers beyond the tweets and headlines are the guts of the poll, the sample and methodology. Here they are.
This survey oversampled Democrats by 9 points. And how many of those 33 percent independents are truly independent? The average Trump-supporter who gets a telephone call survey will either hang up or else give the pollster the answer he is looking for rather than be castigated as a Trump voter.
In addition, Quinnipiac surveyed registered, rather than likely, voters. Likely voters are only a small fraction of registered voters, many of whom won't turn out to vote, especially in midterm elections.
Between the sample and the weighting, it is no surprise that the poll results tilt heavily in favor of Democrat talking points.
Alternatively, look at Rasmussen, the most accurate pollster for the 2016 presidential election. In its Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, it surveys likely voters, not simply registered voters. On Sept. 10, 2018, the same day as the Quinnipiac poll, President Trump was at 48 percent total approval, 51 percent total disapproval, similar to where he has been for most of this year.
What Brian Stelter and Morning Joe won't tell you is what their idol Barack Obama's poll numbers were in the same Rasmussen poll at the exact same point in his presidency. But I will.
On Sept. 10, 2010, "the one we have all been waiting for" was at 42 percent total approval, 56 percent disapproval, 6 points lower than the Neanderthal Trump who Quinnipiac says is unfit to serve as president.
How inconvenient, but also how instructive. Are these polls designed to reflect popular opinion or shape it?
Do the media want to objectively report President Trump's popularity? Or do they have a narrative they wish to promote, using a deliberately flawed poll, sample, and methodology?
That would be like conducting a Trump popularity poll in Ithaca, Berkeley, or Boulder, then attempting to extrapolate the results to the rest of the United States.
Expect to see more of these phony polls leading up to the midterms. These will be the new tool of a hyper-partisan media, desperate to bring down a president they loathe and right the catastrophic wrong that occurred in November 2016.
Bob Woodward's book, the New York Times op-ed, Omarosa's tapes, Stormy's tales, and hysterical Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are all part of the mix, now joined by propaganda polls.
Treat these polls for what they are – partisan campaign commercials – and don't despair. These same pollsters predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide victory in 2016. But do remember to vote this coming November. The stakes could not be higher.
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver-based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
