Trump Hires Poll Unskewer John McLaughlin To Take On CNN, Numbers, Deep State Math

Did Trump write this?

Reality is a DEEP STATE plot! Luckily President Bunkerbitch knows just how to deal with objective facts and their damn, dirty scheming. That's right, he pays someone to spin him a nice little cocoon of fairy tales. A safe space if you will. It's warm in there, and as long as you keep OANN playing at all times, there's no chance of upsetting truth leaking in.

The president's most recent hire is famous poll un-skewer John McLaughlin, brought onboard to prove it is just science fact that all the polls showing Biden beating Trump are bullshit.

...Crooked Hillary Clinton in 2016. They are called SUPPRESSION POLLS, and are put out to dampen enthusiasm. Despit… https: //t.co/v5JnPAEx80

— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1591643687.0 

UHHHHHHHH ...

Five months before the election, and Trump is already whining that the pollsters are trying to suppress the vote? Criminy, it's going to be a long, stupid summer. It was nice of that nutbag to give political Twitter a chance to come together and dunk on John McLaughlin, though. Last night was a veritable hit reel of races McLaughlin whiffed badly, taking his Republican clients' money and telling them what they wanted to hear.

Like when he told Rep. Barbara Comstock she was one point ahead of Democratic challenger Jennifer Wexton in 2018. Now Wexton represents Northern Virginia in Congress, and Comstock is in the private sector after losing by 12 points.

In 2012, McLaughlin predicted Mitt Romney would win Virginia by 7 and Colorado by 4. He lost them by 4 and 6 points respectively.

That same year, he said that New York's safely blue Sixth District was a 36-33 toss-up between Democrat Grace Meng and Republican Dan Halloran. He managed that magic number by cooking up a poll that showed 30 percent of respondents undecided in October. Meng won 68-31.

The list of McLaughlin flubs is long, but none can top the 2014 GOP congressional primary in Virginia's Seventh District, where McLaughlin showed his client Rep. Eric Cantor walloping challenger Dave Brat by 34 points. Brat won the seat with an 11-point margin, after which the National Republican Congressional Committee told its caucus to think hard about whether they wanted such an incompetent boob running their polling operations. Safe to say the president may be taking some liberties when he describes McLaughlin as a "highly respected pollster."

And indeed this "memo" is of a piece with McLaughlin's work product generally. His main point is that 2016's turnout model, when large numbers of Democrats stayed home because they didn't love Clinton and the media assured us she was going to win anyway, is the only legitimate metric, and everything else is a deliberate attempt to suppress the vote.

"So instead of the 33% Republican turnout which actually happened in 2020, they are reporting polls on only 26%, 25% or even 24% Republicans," McLaughlin blustered. Let's assume that he means 2016, not 2020, since the Republican presidential primary this year was a foregone conclusion, and Democrats accounted for 68 percent of total votes cast. Why is it illegal to disregard changing demographics, actual voter registration, or the massive Democratic turnout in 2018? Okay, to be fair, it's understandable that McLaughlin might want to memory hole the midterms, since he predicted the GOP would hold the House and possibly even pick up a seat or two, when they wound up losing 41 seats.

"For example, the CNN poll out today is another skewed anti-Trump poll of only 25% Republican," he continued in a grammatical style which sounds suspiciously like his client. "It's a poll of 1,259 adults — not even registered voters, let alone likely voters."   Well, actually, the 14 percent Biden margin came from a poll of 1,125 registered voters. But, go off, dude!

"Also, it was done between June 2nd and 5th, before the great economic news from last Friday," he continued. McLaughlin accused both CNN and the NBC/Wall Street Journal pollsters of deliberately skewing their polls by conducting them before the unexpectedly good jobs numbers came out last Friday. How is it cheating to conduct a poll to exclude an unanticipated future event which might affect the outcome? Obviously, the space time continuum is #RIGGED!

"The latest media spin is that it's too late to define Joe Biden and it's too late for President Trump to win," McLaughlin theorized. "We can hardly wait until they start spinning a 'Biden electoral lock'. It has to be a strategy to counter the enthusiasm of Trump voters."

UH HUH. Well, leaving aside the wisdom of using a guy whose entire job is to brew up insanely rosy polls for GOP candidates, that language about it being "too late to define Joe Biden" sounds kinda familiar. Hey, Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine , remind us where we heard it before.

A slew of polling finds Biden's lead ranging from a low of 7 to CNN's high of 14. Trump's staffers backhandedly acknowledge this fact by the rote denials they have been giving reporters whenever asked about Trump's polling: "Our internal data consistently shows the president running strong against a defined Joe Biden in all of our key states." This line might sound confident, until you realize "defined" means "after pollsters have given respondents one-sided attack messages against him" and "running strong" means "still losing."

OH RIGHT! So Donald Trump's own internal pollsters can only get good numbers when they ask a question like, "If we told you that Joe Biden is a China-loving career politician whose son may have taken bribes in Ukraine, would you vote for him? What if we told you he kicks puppies?" But, please, tell us more about how the media is trying to suppress the vote five months before the election by undersampling Republicans.

Okay, enough of this pathetic shit. We've given it too many pixels already. In summary and in conclusion, Donald Trump is a demented little snowflake surrounding himself in ever-thicker layers of nonsense because objective reality is DEEP STATE. At this rate, the entire White House will be one huge rubber room by November.

[ Hill / NYMag ]

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