Dear New York Times: You Need to Teach Your Reporters How to Read Polls
Dear New York Times: You Need to Teach Your Reporters How to Read Polls
Apparently, Democrats hate Old, Sleepy Joe and don’t want him to run again for President in 2024.
At least according to The New York Times, anyway.
In its never-ending effort to present both sides to its readers, Times reporter Shane Goldmacher stepped in a large bucket of stupid with his latests article entitled “Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows.”
The poll in question is the latest New York Times/Siena College poll of a whopping 849 registered voters, with a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points. The poll was conducted by telephone (meaning landline telephone, not cell) so right from the start your pool of respondents is small. Who has a landline telephone these days?
This is what’s known as a useless poll. It doesn’t represent the majority of voters in the country. Heck, it doesn’t even represent the majority of Democrats. The pool of respondents was too small to be truly meaningful.
Still, Shane lets us know that “President Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33 percent job-approval rating.”
By “Democratic voters” he means people that voted for the Democratic candidate in the last election, not necessarily that they are registered Democrats. He found a number of voters who were Republicans, but did not vote for Trump. But they are so pissed at Biden for his lousy job performance that they plan to vote Republican in 2024.
These are what’s known as Republicans. They may call themselves Independents or Never Trumpers, and they may not be MAGA, but they are certainly not Democrats or disaffected traditional Republicans. If you plan to vote Republican after what we just went through in the past six years, you are the problem. You don’t care about this country. You are not interested in fixing any of our problems. You just want more of the same.
“Anybody could be doing a better job than what they’re doing right now,” said Clifton Heard, a 44-year-old maintenance specialist in Foley, Ala.,” writes Shane. “An independent, he said he voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but is disillusioned over the state of the economy and the spiraling price of gas, and is now reconsidering Mr. Trump.”
So what does it all mean?
It means that Shane found a number of “low-information” voters that haven’t been paying attention the past six years to quote in his article.
The paper is trying to be “balanced” in its journalism, but fails miserably.
There have been so many stories coming out of the the January 6th Committee about Trump’s criminal activities that the paper feels that need to give President Biden equal time.
The paper seems to think that equal time means equally bad stories about both Trump and President Biden is what’s required.
But they seem to either forget, or conveniently ignore the fact, that Trump’s approval rating when he left office was 34%. They also seem to ignore that Saint Ronald Reagan’s approval rating in mid-1982 hit a low of 35% because of inflation and 10% unemployment.
Reagan went on to win re-election by a margin of 60%.
So low approval ratings at the mid-term is not unusual for a president. And it’s certainly not a uniquely Democrat thing.
And using polls as the basis of an article is not a very good idea. Especially when the poll is based on a small number of respondents and is not representative of anything, let alone what people in the country are thinking.