If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?

Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.

The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Commenting to emphasize this for the people who weren’t paying attention in 2016. If you vote for an alternative to what would normally be your candidate, it’s pretty much the same as voting for their competitor. That is, if you vote for a third party alternative to Biden, you’re basically voting for Trump (and if you vote for a third party alternative to Trump, assuming he wins the primary, it’s like voting for Biden).

    If there are no candidates running who you are happy with, but there is a candidate that you think would be especially destructive, you should vote for that candidates main competitor. Otherwise you’re contributing to the destructive candidate winning.

    • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      That sounds like a Biden problem, DNC runs a weak shit candidate that no one wants to run, if he loses they are to blame.