Politics

1025 readers

1 users here now

@politics on kbin.social is a magazine to share and discuss current events news, opinion/analysis, videos, or other informative content related to politicians, politics, or policy-making at all levels of governance (federal, state, local), both domestic and international. Members of all political perspectives are welcome here, though we run a tight ship. Community guidelines and submission rules were co-created between the Mod Team and early members of @politics. Please read all community guidelines and submission rules carefully before engaging our magazine.

founded 2 years ago

Majority of American Voters Shrug at Trump Indictment. 53 Percent Want Him Pardoned If Convicted (www.rollingstone.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Even though most voters say that the case against the former president is “strong,” they don’t want to see him serving jail time

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'd take this with a grain of salt. Mark Penn, chairman of The Harris Poll and one of three who supervised this poll, is a known Trump supporter who believes in the Democratic "deep state" conspiracy theory. Dritan Nesho, CEO of HarrisX and the second person supervising this poll, tries to appear bipartisan in public, is a little more discreet but is also a Trump supporter. I gave up looking up stuff on these people cuz I feel gross now. Dunno how The Harris Poll and HarrisX are affiliated. Yeah this poll is b.s.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's silly to judge a polling outfit solely on the politics of their CEO.

FWIW, 538 gave Harris a "B" grade with 83% accuracy in 2020. If anything, Harris seemed to overestimate Biden's support (eg they predicted Trump would lose FL and NC).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Their accuracy of their election prediction is separate from their polling bias. I mentioned in a higher comment that their polling technique has been described as "when Harvard Poll meets Fox News" and that they "cherrypick to advance agendas"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This article does talk about "When a Harvard poll meets Fox News", but it's criticizing Fox News's distortion of a Harris poll, not the poll itself (i.e., "How Fox News and conservative media outlets are using a recent Harvard Poll to support their own election narrative.")

And Penn is actually the one complaining about those who "cherry pick to advance agendas". He specifically objected to Fox cherry picking his poll to say that voters prefer a "law and order" candidate like Trump.

Mark J. Penn ’76, a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and leading pollster for the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, explains that Fox News’s claim that poll results reflected a positive response to “law and order” messaging “is not the full context of the story.” “Look, articles like this take things out of context,” he continues. “They’re written to make a political point. That’s not the whole picture.”

Penn, a former Crimson news editor, believes that the correct analysis of the poll is that “BLM and the police, frankly, have much better images than” both Biden and Trump. The poll finds that 67 percent of respondents view the police either favorably or very favorably, and 51 percent of respondents view Black Lives Matter favorably or very favorably. In comparison, 44 percent and 48 percent of respondents had a favorable or somewhat favorable view of Trump and Biden, respectively.

“I didn’t cooperate with that article,” Penn says when asked about his thoughts on the Fox News story. “It’s unfortunate that people cherry pick [the poll] and use it to advance agendas.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for showing where that phrase was used in writing, but that is not the only time he has been pointed out for the irony of his juxtaposition. He is a former pollster for the Clintons that became very "trumpy" (to use Politico's word) and instead of being on all news shows the only one that would bring him on is Fox.

The thing about polling is that one can write the questions in order to get the answers they want or need and data can be extracted to portray what is needed. Without the raw data, we really don't know what was asked or how the data portrayed was pulled.

load more comments (1 replies)