30 Sep 2020 2:58 pm
In one of his chopper talks a few minutes ago, Trump said that he has seen at least 6 polls that show that he won the debate last night.
Shortly after the first presidential debate ended on Tuesday night, Fox News’s Sean Hannity seized upon two online surveys to declare victory for his friend President Trump.
One, from Telemundo, had Trump winning by a 2-to-1 margin, he said.
Another, from WGN, had a similarly lopsided result.
“Early reviews, instant response, instant polls,” Hannity said.
“I’m sure the, you know, the mainstream media will have corrupt polls, as they always do, but those are the two flash polls that we have already.”
The press secretary Trump formally employs made a similar argument on Twitter.
The thing about those surveys is that they are garbage.
This isn’t meant as disparagement; it’s meant as an accurate reflection of the utility of a survey that consists of a media outlet such as C-SPAN asking people on Twitter whom they think won.
A good rule of thumb for a poll is that if anyone can weigh in on it and can encourage other people to participate as well, it’s not going to yield a useful result.
When Telemundo announced the results of its informal Twitter survey, it deliberately pointed out that the results weren’t scientific, slightly moderating the uselessness of sharing such information in the first place.
Hannity, of course, offered no such qualifier — instead disparaging mainstream media polls that he certainly knew would be less generous in their assessments of the results.
(If you enjoy watching Hannity amplify uninformative results to make a political point while we wait for more accurate results to come in, you’re going to want to watch Fox News on election night.)
In short order, scientific polls from reputable outlets were released.
While White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany decided to share the results of a CNN reporter asking an on-air focus group whom they planned to support, the network’s actual poll, conducted with SSRS, offered a much bleaker review of Trump’s performance.
Sixty percent of respondents in CNN’s real poll thought that former vice president Joe Biden won the debate.
Only 28 percent thought that Trump did.
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Over time, as more polls come out evaluating the debate and the race, we’ll have a better sense for what Tuesday night meant.
We nonetheless focus on this “who won” question because it seems concrete, a tick forward in the long contest between the candidates.
But a debate in which Trump didn’t clearly advance relative to Biden is a loss for the president.
No matter what Hannity says Telemundo said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... hlighting/