Last August 13th, headlines blared about a Fox News poll ranking the DEMOCRATS and declaring that if the election was held today, Donald Trump would lose to each of the top three DEMOCRAT candidates.
This poll hit the mainstream news echo chamber for a week as the press fashioned any number of doomsday headlines (to which Donald Trump had to respond that he "was not happy with it").
Of course, that statement hit the news for another week.
Here, too, it appears that the results are skewed.
It turns out that Fox News polled 8% more DEMOCRATS than Republicans.
For proof of the distorting effects of such polling, just consider the Trump vs. Clinton race in 2016.
Out of twenty polls conducted by some of the most reputable news sources in the U.S., there was only one (IBD/TIPP) that gave Trump the edge on election day.
Most of these polls gave Clinton a 70% chance to win and some were 99% convinced.
Not surprisingly, CNBC published an article titled, “Trump Victory All but Impossible Based on Previous Races” a month before the election.
Obviously, CNBC was pretty far off the mark.
Again, attention to detail matters. In the research conducted in October 2016, 43% of the individuals interviewed were DEMOCRATS, 36% were Republicans, and 16% claimed to be Independent.
Based on their prediction and the real outcome of the election, it’s possible that seven percentage points is more than just a rounding error.
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