If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?
Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.
The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.
If anyone here is just joining the party, Charles Peirce was one of the few corporate news voices (all of whom were op-ed, very purposefully) who was allowed to say what we were actually seeing.
For a few years it was a crushing torrent of gaslighting and insanity and the corporate news just went with it. Jeff Tiedrich on twitter and Charles Pierce in Esquire were two loud voices saying wtf everytime some new batshit thing would happen. It was very helpful.
Those of you upset about the poor take on mushrooms, take five. The gist is that polls this bad shouldn’t be blowtorched onto the news cycle. Which us exactly what many of us were saying yesterday.
Because bullshit like this poll is how republiQans fool enough of the people to crack open the electoral college. It’s the 2016 playbook, being run again right in front of us like we didn’t just go through that hell. F that.