NY Times Does It Again

Creating News is Not Journalism

This was in my email inbox this morning. Many of you have cancelled your subscription to this rag. So here is a gifted link, if you are feeling masochistic enough to read the whole thing.

BREAKING NEWS

Many voters want to learn more about Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump remains strong even after a rough month.

Sunday, September 8, 2024 5:03 AM ET

The national results are in line with polls in the seven battleground states that will decide the presidential election, where Ms. Harris is tied with Mr. Trump or holds slim leads, according to New York Times polling averages.

I tapped on this piece of click bait and here was the “story”:

”Trump and Harris Neck and Neck After Summer Upheaval, Times/Siena Poll Finds”

Here are some tidbits from this ridiculous piece of created “news”.

“I don’t know what Kamala’s plans are,” said Dawn Conley, a 48-year-old small-business owner in Knoxville, Tenn., who is leaning toward Mr. Trump but is not completely decided. “It’s kind of hard to make a decision when you don’t know what the other party’s platform is going to be.”

”Among the many recommendations in the 900-page document, Project 2025 proposes to criminalize pornography, disband the Commerce and Education departments, reject the idea of abortion as health care and shred climate protections.

Three-quarters of likely voters said they had heard about Project 2025, and of those, 63 percent said they opposed it.”

Call me crazy, but if 63% say they oppose the fascism of Project 2025, how can anyone say they don’t know enough about a “party’s platform?”

Earth to Dawn Conley: Donald Trump = fascism and the destruction of me, your planet.

According to Statista, in 2022, there were 161.42 million people registered to vote in the United States.

This is how the poll was taken:
”For this poll, interviewers placed nearly 194,000 calls to nearly 104,000 voters.”

My grade school math says that the pollers came to their conclusions by surveying .0644282 percent of registered voters - people who are willing to answer their phones when receiving calls from unknown phone numbers.

At the end of this piece, there is a CYA explanation:

“The poll’s margin of sampling error among likely voters is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When computing the difference between two values — such as a candidate’s lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.”

Employing my grade school math again, I conclude based on this tiny sample - that the margin of error in this poll is therefore, by the author’s definition at least, 5.6%. Or precisely (/s) 9,039,520 votes. Essentially saying that while we believe in our process, there are good odds that the poll is completely inaccurate!

Additional perspective from the Pew Research Organization:
“About two-thirds of registered voters identify as a partisan, and they are roughly evenly split between those who say they are Republicans (32% of voters) and those who say they are Democrats (33%). Roughly a third instead say they are independents or something else (35%), with most of these voters leaning toward one of the parties.”

And finally, just in case you still think these polls have any credibility AT ALL, check out this recap of over 1000 polls taken in the fall of 2016 - right up to election day:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/national-polls/

If these polls were worth anything more than a bag of cow spit, Hillary would be completing her second term and the Climate Catastrophe mitigation process would be well under way.

But here is my optimistic spin on the NY Times article and all others like it. If the race does look like it is “neck and neck”, the terror in our hearts may motivate us, as Michelle Obama said, to “Do Something!”

Reach out to any friends or relatives that may be disillusioned, infrequent voters. Motivate them by explaining Project 2025. Ask them how they could allow someone like Trump to return to the White House. Need some talking points?

Republican playbook for their next presidency:
https://democracyforward.org/the-peoples-guide-to-project-2025/?utm_sourcedf-ad&source=df-ad&utm_campaign=202407-project2025&utm_medium=google-search&market=google-search&utm_content={adgroup}&utm_term=project%202025&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwlvW2BhDyARIsADnIe-JPjz3b2RgSCMu4fqSGkmVxsboUiuKxU96Uso8qE4WCcRHdfHSU4p4aAuV_EALw_wcB
List of worst things said by Trump:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/27/worst-things-that-trump-has-said
List of Trump atrocities through 2021:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056
Tracking the criminal charges against Trump:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-cases-georgia-washington-florida-nyc-charges-key-dates-213951743.html

gifted link to the NYTimes clickbait:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/us/politics/trump-and-harris-times-siena-poll.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE4.7rAR.xFtMmYTLXTBa&smid=url-share

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273743/number-of-registered-voters-in-the-united-states/

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/