Newsflash out of Gallup that actually isn’t even a joke: in the debate over Internet polls vs. “official polls” at the center of the United States Democratic presidential race, I shine. I shine and I win commandingly. That’s right, I win #Debategate.
For those out of the loop, a heated argument arose between Slate and its readers over which candidate “won” the October 13 Democratic debate. Several of the publication’s pundits, all presupposing that public opinion heavily favors Hillary Clinton, penned articles declaring her the clear-cut victor. Though Bernie Sanders trounced the Secretary in every online poll and focus group—ironically earning three fourths of the 95,000 votes cast in Slate’s own survey—the media all metaphorically held hands and agreed with each other. (Cue the beautifully relevant General Patton quote.)
“No one should mistake [online polls] for the scientific surveys done by professional pollsters,” cautioned Slate columnist Josh Voorhees, in defense of his pro-Clinton panegyric. He argues that online polls are liable to attract a faction of vocal die-hards, but hardly represent the electorate-at-large. “Online polls are the worst possible measure of public opinion,” agreed Slate contributor Amanda Marcotte, urging those with a scientific predisposition to the contrary to “step down.”
“Buh-buh-buh, media bias,” tweeted Slate’s senior editor Jeremy Stahl, linking readers to an opinion poll suggesting Clinton won. Attributable in part to its derisive, pubescent tenor, Stahl’s tweet garnered just two retweets. But why else?
Because six full days before the first Sanders/Clinton debate, Stephen Shepard reported in an evidently unread Politico story that Gallup, that authoritative bedrock of American polling science, will no longer be surveying the population’s opinions on the presidential primary “horse race” due to major concerns about the scientific validity of the practice in an increasingly digitized world. Nor has Pew Research conducted any preference polls on the 2016 candidates. Why this retrenchment from Voorhees’s “professional pollsters?”
Well, as the Washington Post reported last year, more than three fifths of adults younger than age 45 “use only their cellphones, not landlines,” and that percentage is increasing. The Post’s polling expert, Peyton Craighill, explains that accurately accounting for cellphone users, an increasingly difficult and expensive task for pollsters, is “absolutely essential for any reliable poll” in the year 2015. Most polls don’t represent them, and survey-response rates are at an all time low. In his vitally relevant August 31 piece, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman also fires a figurative pistol into the heart of the Slate thesis.
The $12 million legal settlement in Soto v. The Gallup Corporation, Think Progress reported in August, should halt the level of credence one ought to give to “official polls” cited by opinion-shapers in the Democratic primary.
This is undebatably newsworthy when we consider that Americans under the age of 30, like me, side with Sanders by almost 30 percentage points (according to this pseudo-scientific MSNBC poll conducted between October 13 and October 15).
And while we’re talking science, why not examine the candidates on climate change? That’s an issue Voorhees omitted in his first debate scorecard, although he admitted its relevance in a retweet the following day alluding to Clinton’s failure on the issue.
During the debate, Clinton told Anderson Cooper she was “literally…trying to find the Chinese” at the crass fiasco also known as the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen. This was just months before the then-leading diplomat literally presided over a war in petroleum-rich Libya. Bearing emeticly obvious contrast, Sanders expressed pride that he and Senator Barbara Boxer introduced legislation to price carbon pollution. Indeed, he did so during an era in which an embarrassing number of Americans were debating whether or not the climate-change phenomenon even existed. It does, top scientists at Exxon have reportedly known since years before many of us were born. The verdict: Sanders won on this issue.
Speaking of going green, how’s legal weed polling, almost two years after Juli Weiner ruthlessly exposed the stooge-like nature of David Brooks’ opinion on the matter? It’s above 50% now, Gallup tells us. It seems both shrewd and authentically democratic, then, that Sanders endorsed the plant’s legalization during the debate. Even President Obama seemed to agree at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. *Gavel strike* Sanders #berns the competition.
Would a majority of youth object to college tuition costing what it did at UConn during the 1970 Student Strike (nothing)? No. Sanders won on this issue.
On their Iraq War votes and the region’s ensuing destabilization? Sanders.
It’s as if pundits think the BS-detectors of millennials haven’t been oozingly over-honed since Clinton told her Wall Street constituents to “cut it out” before the 2008 crash, as she told debate moderator Anderson Cooper. Cut it out? Should we give her some kind of sticker or medal? Imagine if you bragged about how you told a thief you witnessed burglarizing your neighbor’s home to cut it out, while declining to call police and report the crime. Taxpayers wanted prompt prosecution—not Clinton’s demure “cut it out” –– to deter future financial crimes if not for the sake of justice itself. *Gavel strike* Hillary loses.
Propitiously, maybe, for those of us who resent being told how to think, CBS News and Twitter announced Monday October 26 they’re teaming up to cover the second Democratic debate on November 14. One can only hope a more interactive and substantive social-media discussion will drown out the drone of uniformly themed, cursory Slate articles that are anticipated to metastasize in young Facebook users’ feeds.
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