Who blew it; bad polls or bad parody?

It has become the trendy thing to do, particularly for whiny backers of president-elect Donald Trump who are determined to believe the whole world is rigged against their inherently superior beings. Lambast the pollsters and political geeks who were convinced that we’d now have President-elect Hillary R. Clinton.
 

CLINTON: Will she take pleasure in historic defeat?

Sure enough, there were plenty of polls prior to Election Day that indicated Clinton likely would come out of the process with a slight lead.

THE POLLSTER BASHING goes around the notion that these ridiculous twits couldn’t see for themselves how popular Trump was amongst the “real” people of the country.

But then I look at the voter tallies, that as of Tuesday were indicating that some 1.7 million more people cast votes for Clinton rather than Trump. Who’s to say how big the gap will get by the time every vote is counted and the final results are certified.

Could it be that the polls “got it right,” but were asking the wrong question – largely because the people weren’t focusing on the correct issue?

The fact is that the polls that were constantly reported on, particularly by broadcast news outlets, were oversimplified nonsense that really didn’t tell us much.

THEY ASKED AN assortment of people from across the country who they favored for president in the upcoming election, then gave us numbers based off that national mix.

Which is phonier; '16 Electoral College results...

If they said that Clinton had a 1- or 2-point lead over Trump, one could argue that Clinton seems to have exceeded that tally slightly.

But the problem is that isn’t how we elect presidents in this country. We don’t have national elections with a vote tally from across the country. We have a series of statewide elections, with the results of each then combined into a process that gives us the Electoral College.

To accurately tell us what we’d need to know, we would have had to poll each and every state individually, then take the results and figure out how that would impact the awarding of delegates from each state.

... or Trump University degree?

RESULTING IN THE Electoral College tally that will be compiled early next month that will make the selection of Donald J. Trump as our nation’s 45^th president official.

Actually, the few times I saw poll results coming from specific states that were figured to be battlegrounds, they indicated potential problems for Hillary. I’d argue that the information was there, if people were willing to take the time to try to read it properly.

Although that becomes the problem – too many people don’t really want to take the time to do anything. Just like the issue of “fake news” reports that seem to be becoming more and more popular.

Largely from people who think they’re getting a laugh out of reading that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump – just like all those National Enquirer reports throughout the years about extra-terrestrial visits to Earth.

THEN AGAIN, MAYBE they see the old photographs of Elvis Presley meeting with Richard Nixon and figure nothing is too weird to believe.

Does this feel like a 'fake news' report?

I know some people try to claim that these humorous efforts are merely satiric in nature – yet satire always has a legitimate point to make in its exaggerations of the truth. Much of these nonsensical items are meant merely to confuse. Although I must confess to finding some amusement in the report from the Onion following the World Series – the report that said generations of now-deceased Cubs fans conducted a drunken riot in Heaven in celebration of their one-time favorite ball club’s victory after all these years.

That report indicated that God banished a few hundred of the most intoxicated revelers from Heaven to Hell as punishment.

A fate I’d like to believe will eventually befall those people who persist in spewing their partisan nonsense out of a desire to confuse, rather than inform.

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