NBC News just ran with a hilariously revealing headline about the sagging, subpar quality of former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign for the White House that went like this: “Biden is far less unpopular than Hillary Clinton was four years ago, polling shows.”
Make way for the Biden 2020 bumper stickers — “Vote for Me, I’m Not Hillary.”
Let’s remember, that’s after Hillary ran an equally subpar campaign for the White House in 2016 that went like this: “Vote for Me, I’m Not Donald Trump.”
The takeaway? If this is all the Democrats’ water carriers in the media can come up with, Biden’s in even deeper trouble than believed. But it’s not for lack of trying. Biden may be a sucky candidate for president, but pollsters and press alike are working furiously around the clock to disguise that truth.
Witness the latest, a double-whammy hit job against President Donald Trump that aptly shows how ridiculously easy it is to take biased poll numbers and push them through the press as fact.
Reuters, reporting on its own poll, published a story with this headline: “Biden opens 13-point advantage as Trump popularity drops to seven-month low: Reuters/Ipsos poll.”
That’s a hair-raising lead. A hair-raising headline. But it’s utter bull.
Nowhere in the story was the actual poll linked, so it was impossible to see the questions that were asked, or the order in which the questions were asked, or anything that would help explain how Biden was able to have such a rip-roaring lead over Trump, despite being such a sucky candidate — anything independent of Reuters’ own writers, that is, who took the numbers from their own organization and dutifully packaged and presented them in a story as if they were fact.
Yet look close.
Read carefully.
There was this bit at the bottom of the Reuters piece: “The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. The poll gathered responses from 4,426 American adults, including 2,047 Democrats and 1,593 Republicans.”
In other words: The poll was online — a la Survey Monkey. It gathered responses from a majority of Democrats — who hate Trump. And it wasn’t even a gathering of responses from registered voters, but rather American adults. Hmm. Interesting.
Here’s one other clue about the ridiculous findings of this Reuters survey, as reported at the bottom of the Reuters story: “The poll had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of plus or minus 2 percentage points.”
Credibility interval is not the same as a margin of error.
In fact, it’s an entirely unscientific way of gauging public opinion. In a word, it’s bull. The American Association for Public Opinion Research says as much.
“AAPOR urges caution in the interpretation of a new quantity that is appearing with some nonprobability opt-in, online polling results — the credibility interval,” AAPOR warned, way back in 2012. “The credibility interval … requires the pollster to make statistical modeling choices that translate the observed participant observations … into results reflecting the targeted group to which the poll was intended … [T]he underlying biases associated with nonprobability online polls remain a concern.”
Shame on Reuters for the deception. But even more shameful is what happened next.
From The Hill, shortly after Reuters/Ipsos released its survey: “Former Vice President Joe Biden’s national lead over President Trump has increased to 13 percent, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.”
Wait for it, wait for it.
At the bottom, The Hill reported, “Conducted June 10-16, the poll surveyed 4,426 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.”
Nope. Not even close. False.
Biden, pure and simple, is being buoyed by fake polls, fake headlines and false reporting. No wonder Americans don’t trust the media to report the truth.
First appeared at The Washington Times.
