I found this article that may be interesting. Here is the URL: http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/yes-...you/26054/
Here is the article:
Here is the article:
Quote:It wouldn’t be an election cycle if Democrats weren’t panicking, fretting, and pessimistically wringing their hands at the slightest bit of real or imaginary bad news – even as Republicans remain confident in their chances even if they’re behind the eight ball. But you can’t blame Hillary Clinton’s supporters entirely for the fact that they’ve become paralyzed this month and suddenly turned into Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, even though their candidate remains in a fantastic position. After all, the media has essentially resorted to reporting a fictional version of the election lately.
The trouble with September is that there’s really nothing that’s going to happen that’s going to change the minds of any voters. Those who have been following the election closely all along have already made up their minds during the course of the conventions and the resulting fallout. Those who weren’t able to make up their minds by August are going to remain undecided until they’ve gotten a look at the two candidates on the debate stage. But stagnant stretches are terrible for ratings, so the media bends over backward to try to manufacture interest in the election during these stretches.
The easiest way to do that is to pretend it’s a closer election than it really is. Three weeks ago, the polling averages said that Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump nationally by around four points. That’s not a race-deciding margin, but it’s the kind of position you want to be in at this stage of the calendar. But headlines like “It’s still the same four point race it was last month” don’t exactly keep people tuned in.
So we’ve seen most major news outlets, cable news in particular, begin describing the race as “tightening” in the hope of retaining enough public interest in the race to keep ratings from falling into a lull. The trouble: the race hasn’t actually been tightening. So CNN decided to change the methodology of its in-house polling to oversample registered republicans, and voila, it had a headline grabbing poll which said Trump was ahead by two points. Suddenly every other major news outlet was reporting the shocking CNN poll as if it were the only poll, even going so far as to ignore their own in-house polling if that’s what it took to get in on the ratings grab of the stunning story about Trump somehow supposedly having taken the lead for no reason.
But the reality is that if you eliminate the illegitimate CNN poll, and if you also discard the consistently inaccurate outlier poll from the LA Times, the national polling averages show that Hillary Clinton is still leading Donald Trump by around four points. In other words, nothing has changed about this race since last month.
So what about all the shocking movement in the swing state polls? Well, for the most part, that isn’t real either. Of the last six polls conducted in Florida, only two of them show Trump leading the state. One is the CNN poll, which at this point is discardable. The other is the obscure JMC Analytics poll, which has been a consistent outlier. Beyond that, Hillary is still winning Florida, according to the polls that aren’t statistically invalid. But the two Florida polls claiming Trump is in the lead are the only two you’ll hear reported right now.
And remember just last month, when every cable news outlet claimed that whoever won Pennsylvania was going to win the White House? That narrative has been abandoned entirely. You know why? Because Hillary is leading big in Pennsylvania. There isn’t even one outlier poll that the media can grab onto in order to falsely paint Pennsylvania as being close, so instead the media has simply decided that the state no longer matters – and indeed no longer exists.
The people who get caught in the middle of all these hijinks are those whose job is to analyze the polls. You have fully legitimate outlets like FiveThirtyEight which try to average the polls in a meaningful way. But what happens when we all know that some of the polls are being rigged by the media outlets conducting them to begin with? These polling analysis sites are between a rock and a hard place. If they start throwing out polls they know are crap, where do they draw the line? At what point do they cease being statistical analysts and start being mere commentators? Their percentages and predictive models go to crap during these times, but it’s not their fault.
For the sake of the sanctity of the election process, the good news is that none of this blatantly misleading and false reporting from the media appears to have any impact on the outcome of elections. Undecided voters don’t sit around watching political news all day anyway, because if they’re the type who are still undecided at this point, it means they’re the type who don’t think the stakes of this elections are too high to begin with. So they won’t be casting their votes based on which way CNN and MSNBC pretend the election momentum is shifting on any given day.
But it’s enough to drive the dedicated supporters of the leading candidate crazy. When nearly every major media outlet spends all month screaming in unison that the race is “tightening” in the desperate hope of keeping their ratings intact during an otherwise superficial stretch of the election, and when some of those news outlets go so far as to produce comically invalid poll numbers to try to “prove” their claims, it can lull anyone into believing that the race actually is tightening.
But if this race really had been “tightening” and if Donald Trump really had been “closing the gap” for as long as the media has been claiming as much, then he’d have to be ahead by twenty points by now. The movement just isn’t there this month. And would there be? This is not a stretch of the election where minds are made up or changed. That’ll come once the debates start. In the mean time, this is still the same race is was three weeks ago. And unless one of these candidates decides to kidnap the Lindbergh baby and join ISIS next week, it’ll still be the same race between now and at least the first debate. Nothing is changing, other than the way it’s being reported. And even that ultimately has no impact.
