Quinnipiac: Majority of Americans trust media more than Trump to tell them the truth, 52/37

Noteworthy because it contradicts Fox News’s data from last week. When Fox asked registered voters whom they trusted more to tell them the truth, the Trump administration or reporters who cover the White House, they split 45/42. Less than a week later, when Quinnipiac asked voters whether they trust Trump more or the news media more to tell them the truth, the split was … 37/52. Did Trump’s credibility nosedive in the span of a week or is he right that “any negative polls are fake news”? (Spoiler: He is not right.)

Note the sharply different numbers among independents in the two surveys. Here’s what Fox saw…

Indies are +26 for Trump in one poll, -12 for him in the other. Hmmmm. And that’s not the only odd disparity. In Fox’s poll, white voters trust Trump more than the media by a net of 20 points, 54/34, while white college grads are evenly divided at 44/45. In Quinnipiac’s poll, white voters are evenly split between Trump and the media, 45/46, while white college grads trust the media much more than they do him, 37/55. (Nonwhite voters overwhelmingly trust the media more than Trump in both polls, although more so in Quinnipiac.) There’s a gender disparity in the polls too. In Fox’s data, men trust Trump more than they do the media by 12 points while in Quinnipiac’s poll they trust the media more by 10 points. Women trust the media more than Trump in both polls, but the margins are starkly different. In Fox it’s a five-point advantage, in Quinnipiac it’s … 20.

Both polls used registered voters and both used live phone interviews of similarly sized samples roughly a week apart, so go figure why the numbers are so different. It may be that Quinnipiac’s sample skewed much more heavily Democratic than Fox’s, which was 42D/39R. (Quinnipiac didn’t provide a partisan split.) There’s no way to say definitively who’s right, but it’s worth noting that the job approval rating that Quinnipiac found for Trump is conspicuously poor compared to various other polls taken lately. The RCP average has him at 44.7 percent and several surveys, including Fox’s, have him several points higher than that. Quinnipiac has him at 38 percent(!), easily the lowest mark among pollsters being tracked by RCP and the only one to have him under 40. Not only that, but the last Quinnipiac poll conducted at the time of the inauguration had him at 36 percent(!!). That’s the worst number any pollster has recorded since he became president (although Pew, which isn’t tracked by RCP, had him at 39 percent not long ago). For whatever methodological reason, Quinnipiac is piling up polling for Trump that’s consistently and almost uniquely terrible. And it’s not just on questions about the media, either. It’s everything:

Hmmm again. With a little effort, you can cook up a theory that the Fox and Quinnipiac polls aren’t inconsistent and that Trump’s trustworthiness vis-a-vis the media simply took a tumble during the period between when the two polls were conducted. Specifically, the Fox poll was finished on February 13th; Mike Flynn resigned that very evening, followed by days of coverage about how he had misled Mike Pence and how Trump himself had known for weeks about it but had said nothing. The Quinnipiac poll wasn’t conducted until February 16th, days later, so maybe the media buzz about Flynn and Trump really did damage perceptions of Trump’s credibility in the interim. (There was also plenty of chatter during that period about Kellyanne Conway’s credibility, but who knows how many Americans pay attention to cable news blather about a presidential advisor.) My guess, though, is that the differences between the polls are more likely attributable to differences in the samples. And Quinnipiac’s samples, for whatever reason, have been ostentatiously anti-Trump over the first month of his term.

Ah, I see an issue, in the methodology -

Dual frame landline and cell phone samples are generated using Random Digit Dialing procedures by Survey Sampling International (SSI). Both the landline and cellular phone samples are stratified by Census division according to area code.

I believe (or was true when I learned about valid sampling) that random number generation skews results toward urban areas (where all numbers in an Area Code are full), as opposed to verified in-use numbers (where less dense areas that don't have as many people don't have all the numbers/area code filled.

Also, their methodology doesn't state the total number anywhere I could find - just percentages per answer. That way, we can't tear apart their sample ;-) During the election, nearly all polls were skewed heavily toward college educated. Not that those folks would lean farther to the left or anything - haha! Take a conservative kid and send them to a liberal college, and the majority come out liberal, despite our best efforts.

Fake polls and fake news combined = Junk News!

Junk News like junk food will kill you...................eventually................

Dr. Oz: EEG Brain Scans Reveal Fake News Threatens Your Health
Observer ^ | 2/23/17 | Dr. Mehmet Oz

Posted on 2/23/2017, 9:55:44 AM by Mozilla

Our show will spotlight a first-of-its-kind social experiment to identify the dangerous and disruptive effect of fake news on our brains. We had high profile fake news creator Jestin Coler craft two fictional stories: one designed to prey on liberals and another on conservatives.

Women read the articles, not knowing they were fake, as neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen gathered quantitative EEG assessments. The findings supported results of a functional MRI study recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, which showed how challenging a person’s political beliefs could activate the parts of the brain associated with emotion and self-identity.

A self-described liberal woman in our social experiment reported feeling sad after reading a fictional article on illegal immigrants, but revealed stronger irritation and anger when processing a fake story about a jailed climate change researcher. Simultaneous changes in her brain activity were also much greater when processing the climate change story and correlated with a strong emotional response of angst and fear.

A conservative woman demonstrated opposite reactions. For her, the article on illegal immigration elicited changes in brain activity changes that you would see during a physical threat.

The women were not told that the articles were fake until they were seated on stage. What happened next was startling. First, the women understandably, but awkwardly, tried to defend why they believed the false stories, rather than expressing frustration that they had been duped. This natural human tendency was highlighted by one woman’s comment that while the news was fake, it reinforced a truth she felt about our country—so the piece was tolerable.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3528304/posts

So protect your mental health by never watching ANCNNBCBS and some Faux liberals.

Never read any article by the NY or LA Slimes, Compost, SF Gay Rhonical, WSJ supposedly about President Trump.

Then: Donate Monthly to Free Republic and don’t read posts labeled as Fake News or Not Even News. Let Trump drive the liberals and their mediots even more insane and depressed with his real news from Tweets and his controlled Press Conferences!

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