Trump: ‘Phony polls put out by phony media’

WASHINGTON – Is the race for president already over? Does Hillary Clinton have an insurmountable lead?

Or, are the media skewing the polls to give that impression and is the race actually a dead heat?

Donald Trump charged on Monday, “They are phony polls put out by phony media,” because they are trying “to suppress the vote. This way people don’t go out and vote.”

Now there may be evidence to support Trump contention that polls showing him badly trailing, or trailing at all, may be a mirage.

There are also abundant examples of the mainstream media promoting the narrative that the election is all but over, including CNN’s headline Monday, “Clinton looking past Trump to transition planning.”

Polls became a hot button issue on Monday after two developments.

First, an ABC / Washington Post poll showed the Democratic presidential candidate had suddenly jumped to a double-digit lead.

Then, a Democratic email was leaked that seemingly showed how to manipulate poll results.

Here’s where things stand now:

• The latest Real Clear Politics average of major polls shows Clinton with a 5.5 percent lead, having fallen about a point overnight, and just a few points above most polls’ margin of error.

• Then, suddenly on Sunday, the ABC / Washington Post poll gave her a whopping 12 point lead.

• On that same day, the Investors Business Daily, or IBD, poll had Trump with a 2 point lead. On Monday, IBD had the race tied.

• Additionally, as WND reported on Monday, the latest poll from Rasmussen has Trump with a two point lead.

• And, the Los Angeles Times daily tracking poll on Monday gave Clinton a slim one point edge.

IBD calls itself the most accurate of all the 11 national polls, based on its track record over the last three presidential elections.

Highly respected polling analyst Nate Silver, then of the New York Times’ blog FiveThirtyEight, ranked 23 presidential polling organizations in 2012 and described IBD as “the most accurate” tracking poll for the year.

IDB (like the L.A. Times) conducts a tracking poll, which it describes as, “A reading of likely voters based on near-term data. It says how the election would probably turn out, based on that day’s data gathering.”

Both IBD and the ABC / Washington Post polls sample likely voters, so how did they end up with such vastly different results?

One answer may be methodology.

IBD ran an article Monday stating, “If any poll is really out of whack, it’s likely because they missed something in their polling — not political bias.”

IBD’s Terry Jones suggested the key factor may be that IDB sampled 3 percent more independents than did ABC / Washington Post.

And, he observed, “IBD in its latest poll has Trump ahead among independents and ‘other’ by 41% to 32%. That’s much wider than most other polls, and one possible explanation for why the (ABD / Washington Post) poll differs from others.”

IDB’s poll sampled 37 percent Democrats, 29 percent Republicans, and 34 percent Independents.

ABC / Washington Post sampled 36 percent Democrats, 27 percent Republicans, and 31 percent Independents.

The number of Democrats sampled may also have been a key factor.

All the polls all sampled significantly more Democrats than Republicans.

But, according to the most recent national survey on voter allegiances, conducted by Gallup just after the 2014 midterm elections, more Americans actually side with the Republicans than the Democratic.

The survey found 42 percent identified as or leaned toward the Republican Party, and 41 percent identified as Democrats or leaned toward Democratic.

Additionally, the New York Times reported in August that, “Republicans have narrowed the Democrats’ lead in registered voters in several swing states, especially in North Carolina and Florida.”

The paper said, “Although there are still more registered Democrats than Republicans in these key states, the margin is much smaller than it was in 2012.”

The Times found a net shift of GOP over Democratic registrations of 2.2 percent in North Carolina, 1.6 percent in Florida, 0.3 percent in Nevada, and only a 1.1 percent increase in Democrats than Republicans registered in Nevada.

Another answer to the mysterious difference in the results of the ABC / Washington Post and IBD polls may lie in an email released by WikiLeaks, among the 17 batches of leaked emails from the files of Clinton campaign director John Podesta.

The email from the Podesta trove released Sunday contains what looks like instructions on how to skew poll results by polling more Democrats than Republicans, or more left-leaning groups than right-leaning, in order to get the results Democrats desire.

Among Podesta’s emails was a chain containing one sent by a group called “The Atlas Project” to Democratic activist Tom Matzzie in 2008, outlining how to oversample polls.

The email from Matzzie sent on Jan. 10, 2008, reads:

“Hey, when can we meet? I also want to get your Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February. By market, regions, etc. I want to get this all compiled into one set of recommendations so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.”

The  ABC / Washington Post poll showing a 12 point Clinton lead did, in fact, sample 9 percent more Democrats than Republicans.

In contrast, the IBD that poll shows the race tied sampled only 6 percent more Democrats than Republicans.

Specific instructions on how to oversampling Democrats was contained in a report attached to the email, titled “Polling & Media Recommendations” from “The Atlas Project,” and they advised:

• Over-sample Hispanics

• Over-sample the Native American population

• Consistently monitor the sample to ensure it is not too old, and that it has enough African American and Hispanic voters to reflect the state.

• Oversample key districts / regions and ethnic groups as needed.

The Podesta email may be why Trump told supporters in St. Augustine, Fla., on Monday, “Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning.”

Earlier, he tweeted: “We are winning and the press is refusing to report it. Don’t let them fool you- get out and vote! #DrainTheSwamp on November 8th!”

He called the ABC / Washington Post poll “phony” and part of the crooked” and “rigged system that I’ve been talking about since I entered the race.”

On Monday, Rush Limbaugh told his radio show listeners, “This whole email, if I’m understanding this, is actually a manual for pollsters on how to produce the results Podesta wants.”

“[W]hat we have to believe is that all of the people that run these polls, ABC/Washington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal, CBS/New York Times, Monmouth College, you name it, every one of these polls waits for guidelines on who to sample from the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Limbaugh added.

The Washington Post ran an article on Monday claiming the methods outlined in the Podesta email were only recommended for use in internal polling, so that expensive ad purchases would target the voters Democrats wished to reach. The article called any suggestion that the method was meant to sway public polling was “laughably incorrect.”

Clinton campaign manager John Podesta

But, even if that were true, why did the paper’s own poll so clearly oversample Democrats in a survey purporting to reflect national results?

Limbaugh and other critics clearly wondered what other purpose could there be in oversampling Democrats in a public poll?

The radio show host observed, regarding the Podesta email, “Now, I infer from this that we’re not talking about their internal polls. They are attempting here to set out guidelines that they want the media to follow in order to procure and produce certain sets of data.”

Democratic pollster Pat Caddell delivered a scathing rebuke to the Post and its poll, saying on Fox on Sunday night, “Any poll with a nine-point party edge for the Democrats ought to be thrown out.”

He added, The Washington Post poll last week was four points. If you believe that the race changed eight more points in her direction this last week, then I don’t know what event you’re looking at.”

He also noted,” You have three tracking polls, not only the daily tracking polls, not only Investors Daily, which was the best for several cycles, you also have Rasmussen and the LA Times, all of those show the race Trump ahead by a point or even,” and, “I’ve never seen the polls in such contradictory numbers.”

Rush Limbaugh

By Monday, there was ample evidence the mainstream media was using the ABC / Washington Post poll to declare the race over, and that a Clinton victory was inevitable.

That was rebutted Monday in an article in Fox by media observer Howard Kurtz titled, “Too soon: The media cast Trump’s task as Mission Impossible.”

Kurtz said the evidence of a pervasive “Trump-is-sinking narrative” was abundantly evidenced by:

• “[A] New York Times headline, ‘Clinton Hopes for a Mandate and Coattails.’”

• “[W]hen Politico runs a big piece on whether Hillary will tap Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg as Treasury secretary and, yes, handicaps who’s on the short list to be her Agriculture secretary.”

• “[W]hen Fox’s Karl Rove says Trump will have a very hard time coming back and it leads the Huffington Post: ‘ROVE: HE’S TOAST.’”

• “Take this Washington Post lead: ‘A wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders alarmed by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election and concluding that it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign.’

• “’Even if Trump ran the table in the remaining battleground states — Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio — he would fall short of the White House if he cannot flip another state where Clinton currently leads in the polls,’ says Politico.”

• “Data guru Nate Silver of 538: ‘I’m not sure I need to tell you this, but Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the next president. It’s just a question of what ‘probably’ means.’”

• “Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: ‘With less than three weeks to go, and all of the debates blessedly in the rearview mirror, Clinton is in a commanding position in the contest to become the 45th president…’”

Kurtz cautioned, “I have the growing sense that journalists want this long and rather ugly election to be over, and that much of the country does as well. But remember what Yogi Berra said. And we still have two weeks to go.”

Another reason to put less than full faith in polls is what happened the last time a candidate ran against the Washington, D.C., establishment, and had been declared dead by the media two weeks before the election.

As WND reported five days ago, “A Gallup poll released Oct. 26, 1980, showed Ronald Reagan was slipping farther behind President Jimmy Carter, with Carter at 47 percent and Reagan at 39 percent.”

Those polls may have reflected the wishes of the media and the Washington establishment, but they did not reflect reality.

“At the heart of the controversy is the fact that no published survey detected the Reagan landslide before it actually happened,” noted Time Magazine senior correspondent Massimo Calabresi in an article published Oct. 31, 2012.

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