President-elect Donald Trump
The legacy media is claiming that Donald Trump’s approval number among Americans is down to 40 percent just as his inauguration looms.
That would, the reports from ABC and others claim, make him “the most unpopular incoming president since at least Jimmy Carter.”
But critics of the pollsters’ agenda point out that these are the same experts who had Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump by 12 points in their polling only days before the Nov. 8 election, when Trump dominated the critical Electoral College vote total.
And they say the results all come from a cesspool of manipulated numbers, with influencing factors ranging from skewed population samples to outright intimidation and threats against anyone with the audacity to express support for Trump.
The issue reared its head again on Tuesday with a Drudge Report headline, “Bitter Media Play with Approval Polls,” which linked to a Zerohedge analysis that got right to the point.
It featured a note about the poll results, and then a comment from President-elect Donald Trump:
“The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval ratings polls. They are rigged just like before.”
The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017
But Americans have watched polling for years, and often considered it an indicator of the nation’s perspective.
Is there something different now?
Yes, according to Zerohedge.
First, there are the “oversamples.”
“In the month leaded 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 (see ‘New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through ‘Oversamples” and ‘ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary’s ‘Lead’ Shrinks To 2-Points’). 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,” the analysis revealed.
“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. The ABC/Wapo poll showed an 8-point sampling margin for Democrats with only 23 percent of the results taken from Republicans… while the CNN poll showed a similar 8-point advantage for Democrats with only 24 percent respondents identifying as Republicans.”
In layman’s terms, it’s this: If you have many more Democrats responding to a poll than Republicans, especially on political issues, it’s not a surprise that more of those answering choose the result favored by Democrats.
“Of course, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, these sampling mixes couldn’t be further from reality,” it said, citing a party affiliation measure that shows Republicans and Democrats in the nation within a few points.
Politico was one of the outlets accepting the polling results on their face, stating that the results are “a major break from recent presidential transitions.”
“Past presidents-elect have been catapulted to the White House by a surge of popular opinion – even those elected under contentious and controversial circumstances.”
The report claimed, “It’s a huge contrast from just eight years ago, when pre-inauguration CNN/ORC and ABC News/Washington Post polls pegged Obama’s approval rating at 84 percent and 80 percent, respectively.”
The report said Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., of the Trump transition team, was given the poll results as fact, and still was able to point out the real problem.
“Listen, I think this has been a pretty combative relationship between Donald Trump and the press. And frankly, I think the press has been tougher on Donald Trump than most other president-elects. And as a president-elect, Donald Trump has been harder on the press,” he said. “What’s actually happening here is the public fight that Mr. Trump is having with CNN and other media groups is taking some skin off his poll numbers, and it’s gone down.”
In addition to the media organizations’ own bias, there also is the overt pressure from many quarters that portrays Trump supporters as evil, and even threatens them with death.
A series of examples have come out of the reporting on exactly which entertainers will appear at Trump’s inauguration.
Billboard reported Garth Brooks isn’t participating because of his own schedule, which suddenly demanded extra concerts through the weekend because of high ticket demands. But there were questions about whether those were the real reasons.
Billboard also said Jennifer Holliday had looked forward to performing, but then was attacked.
“It’s amazing because I’m not a person that gets a lot of attention or that seeks a lot of attention,” she said. “And I’ve spent all day yesterday and all last night reading all the terrible” messages to her.
TMZ’s report was more blunt, stating matter-of-factly that after Holliday “bailed,” “we’ve learned when her agent contacted the Inauguration Committee, he said the reasons was death threats.”
TMZ quoted a “rep,” for the performer, “It was all of those things. She wasn’t scared to perform. She didn’t want to put her family at risk based on the death threats and she also didn’t want to offend the LGBT community which was especially upset that a past ally would perform on a program with President-Elect Donald Trump.”
The stunning claim that there are those who would threaten a popular star with death for just performing at an event associated with Donald Trump was repeated, too.
The Daily Mail said opera star Andrea Bocelli dropped out of events because of … “death threats.”
The trashing of Trump supporters was building steam even before Hillary Clinton called them the “deplorables.”
Eventually, even the leftist New York Times, in a writing by Michael Lerner, a progressive rabbi, launched a headline: “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters.”
“The left has buttressed [an ideology of shaming people] by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being misunderstood.”
“Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition,” he wrote.
The Guardian also noted the attacks on Trump supporters.
Endorsing it.
Wrote Jessica Valenti, “Trump voters sure are sensitive lately. They’re upset that the cast of the hit play Hamilton made a statement to Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, and that the audience booed him. They’re displeased that their vote is costing them relationships with family and friends. …
“Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid. I was recently accused by a writer of ‘vote shaming’ – but there’s nothing wrong with being made to feel ashamed for doing something shameful.”
And the Peoples View blog, Spandan Chakrabarti wrote, “We have no reason to excuse a Trump voter. We have every reason to shame Trump supporters. It can work. It has worked.”
The writer cited a campaign of vicious attacks, both verbal and physical, on voters in California who eight years ago voted to define marriage in the state constitution as between one man and one woman.
Those attacks, the writer explained, contributed to changing the public opinion about homosexual “marriage.”
The author cited the case of a restaurant owner who lost the business because a manager and hostess donated $100 to the campaign supporting traditional marriage.
“Shaming is not about trying to change the minds of the most ardent supporters of a candidate or of a cause. Shaming is about making it clear that there will be consequences to one’s hate. Shaming is about shaking the confidence of those who weren’t sure of their votes to begin with and with whom arguments of justice resonate, even if it didn’t resonate enough in a given election,” the article explained.
Slate at one point said flatly, “There is no such thing as a good Trump voter,” and Real Clear Politics said, “Trump supporters deserve to be vote-shamed.”
Just weeks before the election, Trump bashed the polling results.
Trump charged at the time, “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.”
There also might have been evidence to support Trump’s contention that polls showing him badly trailing, or trailing at all, may be a mirage.
After all, that was when 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.
The report said virtually all major polls interview more Democrats than Republicans, even though in “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.
There also was an email released by WikiLeaks, among the 17 batches of leaked emails from the files of Clinton campaign director John Podesta, that contained 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.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/media-cling-to-polling-thats-far-from-reality/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/media-cling-to-polling-thats-far-from-reality/
No comments:
Post a Comment