Clinton, Trump Polls: Why They’re Meaningless In One Photo
Clinton and Trump polls going into the convention season are certain about one thing: nothing. Two polls released within one day of each other had staggeringly different results, and they were not from crazed sources like Mother Jones or WND.
In a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, Hillary Clinton has an overwhelming lead over Donald Trum — 13 points — and her credibility post-FBI tongue lashing has actually improved.
Contrasting that improbable finding — after all, even liberal stalwart Stephen Colbert is now trashing Clinton’s trustworthiness — is a CBS News/New York Times poll released earlier today that shows the two candidates locked at 40 percent each.
This very same entry into the Clinton and Trump polls industry has also found the Donald closing a 10-point gap since April.
Which one is likely correct?
Smart money would say the CBS/NYT poll since it has actually fluctuated based on positive and negative news generated by the candidates’ actions. Reuters/Ipsos has been so pro-Clinton from the beginning that if it came out tomorrow they were just polling Democrats, no one would be surprised.
But in a tale of two Clinton and Trump polls, it’s important to look at the deeper context. These are essentially microcosms of what has been going on since the probable party nominees emerged a month or so ago.
It’s why there are websites like Real Clear Politics, which attempt to make sense out of the data by aggregating results from each into a single score, hoping against hope that if they measure enough inaccurate results, they can arrive at some semblance of the truth.
But there’s a lot of truth in that statement that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Extrapolating the logic, it’s safe to say that neither do 20,000, the (probable) actual number of Clinton and Trump polls that have been conducted since the election season started.
Why does it seem like the information is just not as good as it used to be? Two simple reasons.
Firstly, there are a zillion media outlets these days all pushing their own personal agendas, and so most are going to conduct surveys that get them the results they’re looking for. That means instead of asking an equally weighted share of likely/registered voters (33 percent Democrats, 33 percent Republicans, 34 percent Independents), they’re weighting their sample with 35 percent Democrats, 25 percent Republicans, 40 percent Independents, or vice versa. These types of polls are guaranteed to get the same lopsided results time after time.
Secondly, Americans are so much more bitterly divided than they used to be — see Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter, etc. — and the only factor of importance will be how many show up to represent their views on election day.
If someone like Trump spews anti-illegal immigration rhetoric like “Mexico is sending their rapists,” it’s bound to mobilize Hispanic voters. If someone like Clinton sells foreign policy through the back end of the Clinton Foundation and intentionally mishandles classified information on a dubious private server — as Director James Comey and the State Department have affirmed (hat tips to CSPAN and AP, respectively) — it mobilizes Independents, libertarians, and other voters who feel like the system is rigged to support career politicians at the expense of Americans.
Battle of the network stars: Trump vs. Clinton https://t.co/AaZ1HzIMZO pic.twitter.com/AIdznCTKkc
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 13, 2016
Which group is angrier? That’s something no one will know until election day, but it is the question that these Clinton and Trump polls should be getting to the bottom of if they actually want an accurate picture of what will happen in November.
But what do you think of the new Clinton and Trump polls, readers? Is Clinton really up by 13 points, or has Trump pulled even? Sound off in the comments section below.
[Image via DonkeyHotey | Flickr Creative Commons | Resized and Cropped | CC BY-SA 2.0]
