“DAN RATHER ON STEROIDS”
by Don Fredrick, author of The Complete Obama Timeline, ©2016
(Sep. 29, 2016) — In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted September 22-26, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump 42-38 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson garners 7 percent; Jill Stein has 3 percent. At TheGatewayPundit.com, Jim Hoft notes, “For this poll, Ipsos spoke to 1705 Americans, of whom 752 were Democrats. That’s 44 percent of the total. …Ipsos spoke to 570 Republicans for the poll. That’s 33 percent of the total. That’s media fraud. Prepare for the [Trump] landslide.” (Ipsos may just as well have conducted a poll at a steakhouse to find out what percentage of the patrons prefer meat over veggie-burgers.)
It is preposterous to suggest that 44 percent of the voters on November 8 will be Democrats and only 33 percent will be Republicans. To get Clinton a 4-point lead, Ipsos had to survey 15 percent more Democrats than Republicans. Although there are more registered Democrats in the country than registered Republicans, there is certainly not a 15-point Democrat advantage.
ZeroHedge.com points out a respected Pew Research Center study that shows “registered democrats represent about 33% of the electorate while republicans are 29%… a modest 4-point gap versus the 11-point advantage in the Reuters sample. …[I]f we alter the sample data [in the Reuters/Ipsos poll] to reflect what Pew says is the real distribution of democrats versus republicans (i.e. 33% vs. 29%, respectively) and apply the same support levels by party affiliation it results in an 8.5% swing toward Trump who would have a 2.5% lead… very inconvenient [for the Clinton campaign].”
Nationally, therefore, the Democrats have only a 4-point advantage over Republicans among registered voters. Of course, not everyone who is registered to vote will vote, and not everyone will vote for the candidate offered by their party. Some voters will stay home, some Democrats will vote for Trump, and some Republicans will vote for Clinton. Independents are wild cards, but they often lean toward the challenger whose party does not currently control the White House. Obviously no one can predict the outcome of the election, although poll results can suggest trends. But there is virtually no chance that Democrats will outperform Republicans 44-29 percent on election day.
That simply will not happen, which leads to the question, “Why would a pollster oversample Democrats in its survey?” The answer is that the pollster is intentionally attempting to influence the voters. Journalists know that many readers will view the headline (“Candidate X leads candidate Y by Z points!”) and not bother to read the entire story—which is likely to not even include the D/R/I weightings. Broadcast media can be even more manipulative, because the news anchor will simply read a script that says, “Candidate X leads Candidate Y by Z points,’ and there will be no “story” for the television viewer to read—unless he seeks the details of the poll online. Media leftists know that few viewers will bother to do that.
Poll results can be manipulated, and that can influence the election results. If supporters of Candidate Y think he or she has no chance on election day, they may stay home and not bother to vote. The polls are manipulated for that purpose—to make people think there is a lead that is too large to overcome. The power of the media is overwhelming, and that power is routinely abused. On election night in November 2000, for example, CBS anchor Dan Rather declared Al Gore the winner of Florida and thus the winner of the White House—even though the polls were still open in the Florida panhandle. Rather had no business announcing a victor while people were still casting ballots. But the unscrupulous anchor did so because he knew the contest was close in the rest of Florida, and he knew that panhandle voters in the state were primarily Bush supporters, while Gore had the advantage along the I-4 corridor in central Florida and in the southeast. By declaring Gore the winner, Rather hoped to discourage voters who were still in line in the northwest area of the state. If they believed Gore had won, they would have less of a reason to wait to cast a ballot for Bush. Rather wanted them to turn around and go home. The manipulated Reuters/Ipsos poll is Dan Rather on steroids.
It is worth noting that the ethically-challenged Rather’s career was based on shoddy reporting. He was a local CBS reporter in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy gave him precious television airtime to boost his career. He used that time to push the absurd “single-bullet theory” advanced by Warren Commission assistant Arlen Specter—who later advertised his own lack of ethics by switching from Democrat to Republican and back again to Democrat as the political situation arose. (Specter was the Charlie Crist of his time.)
Specter’s single-bullet theory, which came to be known as the “magic-bullet theory,” was the basis for the Warren Commission’s ridiculous claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. Oswald was a patsy, and not an assassin, but Specter’s theory was needed to lay out the foundation for his prosecution. (Jack Ruby then saw to it that Oswald never had the chance to talk, when the Dallas police let him waltz right in and shoot Oswald in the stomach.) The Warren Commission desperately needed the magic-bullet theory, and needed it to be promoted. It was Dan Rather who did the promoting. For that, he was rewarded with a plum CBS career. How Reuters and Ipsos expect to be rewarded for their poll manipulations is not known. They may simply believe that a Clinton in the White House is justification enough. To leftists, the end always justifies any means. Never forget that.