Donald Trump has reportedly filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register newspaper and its pollster, J Ann Selzer, accusing them of consumer fraud and “election interference” over a poll from before the election that showed Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa.
But it is at lesat deeply fun trolling.
And who knows what might come out during discovery? Was she, in fact, selling her reputation for some sum, or promise?
The lawsuit reportedly seeks “accountability for brazen election interference” they allege was committed by the newspaper and Selzer over its 2 November poll, that showed Harris ahead of Trump by three percentage points in Iowa.
Trump ultimately won the state by around 13 percentage points and also beat Harris in the election to become America’s president-elect.
It is possible to be that wrong inadvertently. But, you know, was it inadvertent?
“It’s ok, our candidate’s gonna win, no need for me to go out and vote.”
What would ‘her reputation’ have been worth?
“Well within the margin of error.”
I wonder if DJT is using this as a test case to see if he can go after Zuckerberg and that Jack guy who used to run Twitter.
@jgh in Japan
Kon’nichiwa!
“It’s ok, our candidate’s gonna win, no need for me to go out and vote.”
Ironically, one of my daughters has a boyfriend in the USAF; this was precisely his attitude in reverse ie ‘There’s no way Trump will win, so I’m not wasting my time voting.’
To be fair, while he flies out of Germany his home is in California, so it wouldn’t have made any difference State-wise. But I tried to explain the importance of the popular vote and he wasn’t having it. A black mark.
“Well within the margin of error” doesn’t mean very much without the confidence interval, though,
that showed Harris ahead of Trump by three percentage points in Iowa.
Trump ultimately won the state by around 13 percentage points
So Regime media only had a +16% margin of error in promoting their favourite candidate.
The lawsuit reportedly states that “Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence – it was intentional” and that “as President Trump observed: ‘She knew exactly what she was doing.’”
And so they did. After their sitting president was forced out of running in a bizarre palace coup, the media immediately started running the biggest astroturfing campaign in US history to persuade people that Kamala was winning.
A vice president so embarrassingly useless they hardly mentioned her in the previous four years was suddenly rolled in glitter and presented to the American people as a winner.
They did that because enthusiasm was so low for drooling Brandon it was obviously going to hurt the D’s at the polls – unless they could fake it till she made it by pretending the Dems were surging in popularity so as to encourage D turnout.
So Trump wasn’t just running against Kamalaladingdong’s $1.4Bn of donations from Jeffrey Epstein’s friends – much of which was spent on calling Trump a Nazi – he was also running against billions of dollars worth of airtime the MSM gave over to such important subjects as:
* Is Donald Trump Adolf Hitler?
* Are people who aren’t planning to vote Kamala racist, sexist, or just pure evil?
* Here’s how voting Republican in this election is an existential Threat To Our Democracy
* Here’s how abortion-crazed lady voters are going to Dump Trump
* Here’s how Hispanic voters are flocking to vote for Coconut Joy
Etc.
We’ve seen this kind of thing before, but it used to be in shithole countries where the government owns and employs the press.
In mid-November, Selzer announced her retirement from polling in political contests, stating she is moving on to “other ventures and opportunities”.
She should go to work for John McCain.
This all comes as last week, ABC News, which is owned by Walt Disney, agreed to pay $15m to a foundation and museum to be established by Trump as part of a settlement in yet another defamation lawsuit that the president-elect had launched.
Lol!
“It is possible to be that wrong inadvertently.”
But is it possible to be wrong inadvertently in the same direction all the time?
Jim – as ‘former’ Democrat candidate turned psephological-Mystic-Meg Allan Lichtmann explained on TV, amidst much oy gevalting and impotent librage, the experts got it right but the voters were wrong.
Specifically, he said that nobody could have expected that white supremacy would be more popular than Kamala Harris. But I could have told him that most things are more popular than Clownworld regime figures:
* Rectal cancer
* Wasps
* Evil midgets running through the sewers of Venice
* TV Licensing inspectors
* Dracula
* Noel Edmonds
American network TV was also full of ugly bald black women raging that YT didn’t vote like they were told to. Flow my tears, the Shaniqua said.
It would be interesting to know how many tight congressional house races have flipped from election night Republican to skin-of-teeth Democrat once the long drawn-out counting process has finally obtained the desired outcome.
There is a world of difference between, say, a ten seat majority and one of just two or three as the House Speaker will find out over the next two years and rue the post-election shenanigans and malarkey.
It’s not the margin of error that counts, it’s more the marginal effect of pre and post election fortification.
John – I think the American political system is reaching a point where it’ll be time to just jail the fuckers or have them shot by firing squad after a fair trial.
Yes, they will continue to play games, but the time when they had the luxury of being able to commit monstrous crimes safe in the knowledge that they will never face any personal consequences other than more money is coming to an end. There’s no more ruin left in the nation.
Trump could well be America’s Winston Churchill or Mikhail Gorbachev. He has no intention of dissolving the Empire he just inherited, but the historical, economic and demographic forces the Regime previously unleashed are now beyond anyone’s control.
“But is it possible to be wrong inadvertently in the same direction all the time?”
Best ask the climate change alarmists, they seem to have perfected the process.
@Steve, https://somethingpositive.net/comic/davans-leanings-pt-5/
Something like that? 😉
Grikath – exactly like that, but with lion family fun time:
And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den.
We should keep a vet on standby just in case the lions get sick of Blair meat tho.
Kami was pouring out money buying up every form of insincere, manufactured, fluffball kind of help she could find, even the outrageously priced stuff.
This pollster went far out of character for this one poll. She was usually quite good.
Without much comment, she has the money in November to simply walk away from the business and retire. She didn’t even do the sorts of public explanation/excuse that might allow her to resume work some day.
These things together don’t actually prove anything. But they certainly allow for room for conversation. And discovery, maybe.
@JuliaM
“What would ‘her reputation’ have been worth?”
Selzer had an excellent track record in Iowa polling, and over decades that earned a really high reputation in this admittedly niche field. Polling is hard – knowing who to ask and how to ask them, and having some clue how to weight your sample so that it more closely matches the demographics of voters (and not just those who can vote, but those who will) is a very practical problem, not just about simple arithmetic on a spreadsheet. If you cock up the weightings and especially if it’s combined with your random sample being, as happens from time to time, an outlier, then the two effects together can leave you with a lot of egg on your face. On the other hand pollsters occasionally get lucky, and can have two big errors cancel out to leave them with a very sage-looking result from some pretty shoddy work.
To be clear, Selzer polls had not shown discernible bias in the past, either in favour of Republicans or Democrats. And in both of Trump’s previous runs they were very accurate, so there’s no record of a specifically anti-Trump bias either. Nor is this some minor poll that got puffed up in the mainstream media because it matched their narrative, while more prestigious polls went unreported. Selzer really is the poll in Iowa that psephologists, campaigners, gamblers, politics nerds and anyone who really cares about elections there will pay a lot of attention to. Precisely because Selzer’s track record was uncannily good.
Personally when ranking pollsters I’d be wary of working only on how closely they predicted previous results, since every poll has a margin of error for purely statistical reasons: if a state really is 50:50 and you take an essentially random sample, sometimes you’ll get more of one and sometimes more of the other. Just like if you flip a coin repeatedly, you’re unlikely to find it lands on heads exactly 50% of the time. If a pollster consistently gets closer to the final result than their own margin of error, they might just be lucky (which shouldn’t earn them extra credit compared to another pollster a couple of percent further off the correct result, but still within their own margin of error) or they might be massaging the result to make it look more like they think it should, usually via playing with the weightings. I’d have more faith in pollsters who are very open about their methodology, provided it looks sound, but US pollsters are far worse than the tightly regulated British ones in that respect. Selzer has released cross-tabs and weighting details for that poll in what’s being presented as an exceptional measure of transparency, but in the UK that would simply be par for the course. The final weightings table will be rather less instructive about any interference or manipulation than seeing the documentation for the weighting methodology used to create it. If this does end up in court, my guess is that’s what a lot of argument will be about.
What went wrong in this case, and whether it was conspiracy or cock-up, is a question a lot of people are seriously interested in. But it’s more interesting, not less, precisely because Selzer had a hard-acquired reputation and no previous signs of anti-Trump bias. It’s not a simple case of “lamestream media polls alwaaaays have a huge bias against Trump, so what’s even the story here”?
Anon – But it’s more interesting, not less, precisely because Selzer had a hard-acquired reputation and no previous signs of anti-Trump bias.
Which made procuring her services all the more valuable, especially as the game was to put on a brave face and pretend Kamala was surging. +16% error in favour of the Coconut Brat.
The billionaires knew Trump was going to win, while the “newspapers” they own were telling everyone Kamala had a great chance. Something’s fucky about that.