Donald Trump Bests Leading Democrats In A Poll No Sane Person Would Trust
September 7, 2015Toni Matthews Politics
The idea that Donald Trump will probably not be president after alienating as many American voters as possible isn’t sitting right with everyone. That must be why we’re hearing a lot of noise about a SurveyUSA poll that found Donald Trump could beat ANY of the Democratic front-runners if the election were held today. No, seriously.
The results were broken down like this:
Donald Trump would beat Hillary Clinton 45 percent to 40 percent
Donald Trump would beat Bernie Sanders 44 percent to 40 percent
Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden 44 percent to 42 percent
For some reason, SurveyUSA added Al Gore to the poll and determined that Trump would beat him as well — 44 percent to 41 percent.
It didn’t take long for Donald Trump and his supporters to start declaring this poll to be absolutely legitimate and a fool-proof sign that he is a political force to be reckoned with.
Oh, brother. Did your BS detector begin to ring its little heart out just now? Well, that shouldn’t be surprising. I mean, the GOP has this habit of trying to change reality to reflect a version of it that’s more pleasing to themselves. For instance, building a universe where they get to paint President Barack Obama as the “worst president ever” while ignoring the fact that 9/11, the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and the recession happened on George W. Bush’s watch. The delusion is so powerful that these individuals will rally around a man recently determined to be telling them mostly lies! With behaviors like that to contend with, you’re kind of obligated to be skeptical. Well, it turns out I had every reason to call shenanigans. A closer look at this poll, and it gets wonky really fast. The pollsters surveyed 1,000 people, 900 of whom are registered voters. Now, don’t raise your eyebrow just yet. Somehow Donald Trump and his supporters declaring dominance on the word of a few hundred people isn’t even the most ridiculous part in all of this.http://gty.im/483208412 SurveyUSA broke its poll down according to things like age, gender, and race. When broken down by race, Trump got 25 percent of the African-American vote and a whopping 31 percent of the Latino vote. This poll actually suggests that enough non-white people love Donald Trump that he could easily get into the White House. Forget throwing out Latino reporters, Trump bodyguards assaulting Latino protestors, and the dumb racist things he’s said about African-Americans in the past. In spite of his blatant bigotry, I am seriously expected to believe approximately 1/3 of Latino, African-American, and Asian voters are going to come to the aid of Donald Trump? This is a man who blathers on about the “non-white menace” so much that he inspires hate crimes. Sorry Donald Trump and fans, but there’s just not that many self-loathing non-white voters in America!
Now, would you believe that the above isn’t even the kicker in all this nonsense? SurveyUSA went on to admit the majority of the people who responded to their poll were landline users. Why is this information so significant? Well, I’ll let SurveyUSA explain.
“This survey was conducted using blended sample, mixed-mode. Respondents reachable on a home telephone (62% of registered voters) were interviewed on their home (landline) telephone in the recorded voice of a professional announcer.
[C]ell respondents, as is typically the case, vote more Democratic than do landline respondents. Among just the universe of cell-phone respondents, Clinton defeats Trump by 16 points; Sanders defeats Trump by 12 points; Biden defeats Trump by 17 points; and Gore defeats Trump by 17 points. The more cell-phone respondents a pollster includes in its “mix” of voters, the more Democratic the poll results will be.”
Please allow me to re-quote a section of that for emphasis.
“The more cell-phone respondents a pollster includes in its “mix” of voters, the more Democratic the poll results will be.“
It’s very much worth noting that in the year 2015, you’d be hard-pressed to find people who don’t use cell-phones.
What this tidbit means is that SurveyUSA hopped into a time machine and went back enough decades to allow the majority of people they surveyed to be landline users. I mean, how else are we going to arrive at the conclusion that Donald Trump would handily defeat all of the leading Democratic candidates for president (and Al Gore)?
So let’s just sum this right up. We have a proudly touted poll that shows Donald Trump winning the presidency if an election was held today. The caveats? Registered voter turnout would have to be limited to 900 Americans, mainly landline users, and we’d all have to pretend that Trump has a snowball’s chance in **** of getting about a third of non-white Americans to vote for him.
In GOPLand, where reality is optional when it isn’t the enemy, this method makes perfect sense. As for the rest of us (who know that reality isn’t revisable), I imagine we’ll be trying not to hurt ourselves while laughing.
Trust the Donald Trump crowd to smugly wave around a hopelessly skewed poll if it allows them to pretend he’ll ever be president. |
