OPINION:
The Washington Post has gone all-out crazy in its latest presidential poll.
Ever since Donald Trump has banned the news organization from his events, The Post has been unable to objectively report on the Republican presumed presidential nominee.
The Post’s poll, released Sunday, shows Hillary Clinton with a 12-point lead over Mr. Trump and concludes: “The survey finds broad objections to Trump’s candidacy — from his incendiary rhetoric and values to his handling of both terrorism and his own business — foreshadowing that the November election could be a referendum on Trump more than anything else.”
The major problem with this “news analysis”?
The Post poll over-sampled Democrats by double-digits — surveying 36 percent Democrats to 24 percent of Republicans. It’s no wonder the results were skewed in Mrs. Clinton’s favor — more of her supporters were included in it!
HuffPollster, which aggregates hundreds of polls across nearly 100 different pollsters, has concluded, on average, 38 percent of likely voters are Democrat and 32.9 percent are Republican. So in order to conduct a fair poll — representative of the American population — you need about a five-point sampling spread between the two parties — not 12.
Moreover, in May, The Post seemed to (better) understand this. They sampled 33 percent Democrats to 25 percent Republicans, representing about an 8-point spread. In that poll, Mr. Trump led by 2 points.
On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal also released a similar survey and found Mrs. Clinton with a five-point advantage over Mr. Trump. Its results were similar to other polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports, the Economist, CNN/ORC, Monmouth and CNBC that have all had Mrs. Clinton beating Mr. Trump by five points, on average, in June, making The Post poll the outlier.
It’s as though The Washington Post wanted to stick it to Mr. Trump — to create a bad narrative for him moving into the July Fourth holiday weekend.
The people deserve better. It’s time we all started reading the sample size in these polls, or forget them all together.
People decide elections, not the press.
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