There Are Three Kinds Of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, And Polls

Over the weekend, I started reading the results of the recent Fox News poll and pondered the option of writing a summary of their data. It took me about two minutes to get through the headlines and takeaways, to immediately reflect on the inaccurate polling of the 2016 election.  So instead of summarizing the Fox News poll data, I need to talk about my opinion on polls in 2019.

Back in 2016, every single poll informed us for months that Hillary Clinton was going to win by a landslide. How accurate were those polls? Have Americans who still trust today’s political polls forgotten the atrocities of 2016? Do they have amnesia, or are they just really forgiving? After spending 3 minutes on Twitter, reading comments reacting to the Fox News poll results, I quickly concluded most are not forgiving folk. Quite frankly, many people are fed up with flawed polls, and like myself have not forgotten the polls of 2016 and never will.

I will also never forget The New York Times apologizing to its audience about how they blew it on Trump.  And yet news networks ignore their past mistakes and continue to obsess with new polling information every week.

This Fox News poll is just another poll meant to create public opinion, not measure it. Golly gee, Fox News, thanks. Your flawed poll is just the type of propaganda that the loons at CNN thrive on:

More than half of US voters want President Trump impeached and removed from office, according to a new Fox News poll https://t.co/iZCWc5G8w5

— CNN (@CNN) October 13, 2019

On October 9, Fox News released a new poll that emphasized how “most” Americans (51%) think Trump should be impeached and removed from office over his abuse of power regarding Ukraine.

Fox News guests and hosts are now either ignoring the poll altogether or working to spin it, arguing that polls don’t matter anyway, that they don’t accurately reflect Americans, or that the numbers are actually good considering the treatment of Trump by Democrats and the media.

On The Ingraham Angle, Fox host Laura Ingraham described the poll as “supposedly” saying 51% want the president “impeached or removed” (the poll actually asked if he should be “impeached and removed”). Fox contributor Dan Bongino said that “given the amount of misinformation” and “lies” from the media and others, “it’s actually stunning those numbers aren’t higher.” Bongino concluded that he “wouldn’t panic about any of those numbers — they’ll ebb.”

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo shared the poll results and then concluded that “you’ve got the public and these polls saying one thing, but then when you actually look at the facts, … you’ve got a whole nother, really in my view, way to look at this.”

On America’s Newsroom, Fox News contributor and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted that the impeachment inquiry has “not been bad so far for Republican fundraising or candidate recruitment,” which she claimed “mean infinitely more than a poll.”

I’ve been a fairly loyal Fox News viewer over the years, but there’s just something about the poll data they’re putting down that I’m not picking up.

In reflecting on years past, I may have watched every episode of The West Wing.  It occurred to me that this one clip sums it all up pretty well. Polling Questions Matter:

What are the demographic and psychographic profiles of the people answering the phones and completing these polls? Do polling companies require a sample of informed voters? How informed are the respondents? Or is it about how UN-informed they are? I’ve often pondered that question, and because humor provides the best remedy, here’s a clip from Watters’ World that is worth a share:

Watch @jessebwatters hit the streets to find out how much people really know about Ukraine and the whistleblower. pic.twitter.com/DdCU0rQT6P

— Jesse Watters Primetime (@jesseprimetime) October 13, 2019

Fox has not released their raw data sample sizes reflective of how their sample of 1,033 people answered each question. Their report shows only percentages (which in my opinion is immediately suspect.)

Show me the data

Finally, while the folks doing the poll tell us what their sample size was, no where do they give us raw data, only percentages. That begs the question of just how high the response rate was for this poll. The response rate, i.e. the percentage of people sampled who actually respond, determines the confidence we have in any given poll. And so Fox doesn’t inform as to how many of those initial 1033 people, that is supposed to represent the entire country, actually responded. They tell us they have great confidence in the poll, so why not provide the raw data? How many responded? 500? 200? 900? We simply don’t know other than they tell us that they have great confidence in a poll we now know to be heavily biased.

They tell us that they selected representative samples from each state, but those numbers are also not provided, nor are the response rates for each state.

The bottom line is that a heavily biased poll gave us false conclusions based on a biased sample and Fox News ran with it as their leading story on Thursday.

And that very deceptive poll is what some are using to push an impeachment narrative on a distracted American public. Whatever happened to “Fair and Balanced?”

Before the presidential election of 2016, polling for politics was the same as big data for business. Fundamentally and historically, the key objective behind most research and critical insights from big data has been to help companies and politicians make better decisions. That fundamental purpose and aim of political polling, in my opinion, has evolved.

Post 2016, has the news media sunk to such low standards and values that they now use poll data to validate and add weight to their anchors’ opinions? If their anchors and media brands have lost trust with their audience, do they think that their flawed poll data will now help them sway the actual vote? Sadly, I think their answer to that question is likely, yes.

Today, most political polling appears to have one goal: to sway public opinion toward the far left Democrat mission. THAT is an entirely different business model, and purpose, and one that (after the 2020 election) may cause many to step back and question (1) what it is that they’ve been doing in the name of politics and (2) what have they done to their brand(s) in the process?

At the end of the day the only number that matters is the actual vote count. And I have to say that most recently, President Trump has been recruiting some outstanding “counts” and “sample sizes” at his rallies.  In particular, the “sample size” of his Dallas rally was pretty extraordinary:

Hey Nancy, try to impeach this. pic.twitter.com/xkV4I3k4cE

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 18, 2019

Maybe we should do a poll about polls. I want to quantify the percent of today’s population (outside of the media) that trusts today’s political polls.

Trust matters a lot; maybe we can convince Fox News to survey trust. “Make America Trust Again.” (Wink, wink.) Something tells me we may not see a news media poll on that.

What do you think?