Donald Trump’s poll numbers are so bad his supporters are making up new ones
The polls don’t look good at all for Donald Trump right now. The RealClearPolitics average of the polls has Hillary Clinton up by 6.7 points. The Huffington Post Pollster has Clinton up by 7.4 points. The New York Times gives Clinton an 80 percent chance of winning the election, and FiveThirtyEight gives her an 81.7 percent chance.
In the face of all this bad news, some Trump supporters have taken it upon themselves to, essentially, make up poll numbers that look favorable for Trump. This is Long Room, the website dedicated to changing poll numbers so they’re “unbiased”:
These poll numbers are total bullshit. The website’s methodology page claims that the tracker incorporates state data to accurately reflect the demographics of voters. But it seems that, in reality, if a pollster consistently gets results that favor Clinton, it’s deemed more “biased” — and Long Room changes the number further in Trump’s direction.
Of course, this misses the possibility that the great majority of polls aren’t biased at all and Clinton really is far ahead of Trump in the election.
Still, Trump supporters — especially at r/The_Donald on Reddit — are promoting this site to give themselves a bit of hope.
Now, there are problems with some of the polls out there. FiveThirtyEight, for example, grades all pollsters based on methodology and how well they accurately predicted election results in the past, and not all of them get good grades. Research 2000 and TCJ Research, for instance, get F's. But these aren’t the big polls showing Clinton way ahead — the A-grade Marist, for example, recently found Clinton 15 points ahead.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Back in 2012, when the poll averages showed President Barack Obama ahead of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, conservative activist Dean Chambers started the now-defunct UnskewedPolls.com to “unskew” polls in Romney’s direction. But it turned out that the polling averages were right, and Obama won the election. (Chambers later said he was only wrong because he didn’t account for voter fraud — even though voter fraud is vanishingly rare.)
Maybe this is just a part of modern elections now. As more and more polling averages pop up and accurately predict elections, people on the losing side are going to look for some measure of hope that their candidate can really will win. So they’ll “unskew” or “unbias” the real polls, no matter how ridiculous it may seem.