Republican party releases fake Nevada poll to make it look like Hillary Clinton is in trouble
Peg! try some beet juice!
By Bill Palmer | February 13, 2016
There’s a new poll claiming that Hillary Clinton’s previous twenty-three point lead in Nevada has suddenly vanished and she’s fallen into a tie with Bernie Sanders in the state. One little problem: it’s not a poll. I don’t mean that it’s a statistical outlier, or that it’s questionable. I mean that it’s not a poll. Some ultra-conservative website hired a former republican party operative to release what can only be described as a fake poll aimed at tampering with the democratic primary. Supporters of Clinton and Sanders alike should be outraged at the republican sabotage, because it doesn’t help either candidate.
The “Washington Free Beacon” may sound like a newspaper but it’s actually a website that publishes news from a far-right perspective. Suffice it to say that everyone from the New York Times on down has accused the Free Beacon of dishonest reporting. Yet this is the website which hired TargetPoint, a firm run by former Michigan Republican Party Executive Director Michael Meyers, to conduct the “poll” in question. I’ve looked into the methodology, including the leading questions that were asked before asking respondents to pick a candidate, and it meets the classic definition of a push-poll. In other words, custom results manufactured on demand.
The trouble with Nevada is that it has not been an early-voting state for particularly long. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on MSNBC last night on-air, real pollsters still aren’t sure who the likely caucus-goers are, so most of them aren’t even trying to do polling in the state. That’s created a lack of polling data for analysts to work with. For instance the last legitimate poll in Nevada showed that Clinton had a twenty-three point lead. But that was back at Christmas time, and there is there is no way to know it still holds up. So now this fake “poll” is exploiting that vacuum in order to create the concocted appearance of a tie. And I’m not sure whether that hurts Clinton or Sanders more.'
Hillary currently holds the lead in every remaining state where polling has been conducted, most of them by double digits, so she probably has the lead in Nevada as well. That means the Bernie voters will need to turn out in full force in order to overcome that potential gap. But they’ve just been told that Bernie has climbed to a tie and has all the momentum in the state, meaning they could suddenly get complacent. It’s difficult to predict how this will affect things. But either way it’s intentional republican sabotage of a democratic primary race, and supporters of both democratic candidates should be denouncing this fake “poll” for what it is.
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