Saturday, November 4, 2023

Fake polling to fuel a talking point

Talking point creation is an industry. No doubt some are paid very well for it. So here's one: Twitter closed down discussion of Hunter Biden's laptop for a week before the 2020 election. It probably wasn't a full lockdown because that would be very hard to do, but the New York Post twitter account was suspended. 

So how much effect could that blackout have? The conservatives have been trying to supersize the effect and actually did some polling to check on it, or to manufacture the data they wanted. 

Here is typical conservative reporting on the poll: 

WaPo reporting on the wording of the poll question. Wow. 

"According to our poll," the organization wrote a few weeks after Trump lost, "full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving the President 311 electoral votes."

This is the poll question. Look at how stilted it was:

"At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?"

So this is more talking point manufacturing. The electorate already knew Hunter was a crackhead and had a cushy job that paid too well. We in the electorate didn't really care. No candidate is perfect--not even close. 

Image: Daily Mail


Extras. Politifact, if it helps any. NBC news from 10/30/20. I guess there was some coverage in MSM. 


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