Well, is this just playful trolling, or an omen not being taken seriously on the Left? Michael Rosenblum, the founder of the left-leaning Current TV, which was sold off to Al-Jazeera, had quite the declaration on The Huffington Post: Donald Trump is going to be elected president of the United States. Granted, he didn’t necessarily say polls be damned, though he might as well since Rosenblum said that this race was lost eons ago when Swamp People, Pawn Stars, and the endless World War II programming came on the History Channel. He says the same for the programming on The Discovery Channel and TLC.
He also hits upon what some on the Left in the polling community fear: that people are lying about their support when they’re sampled. In this instance, scores of white working class whites saying they’re leaning, or will vote, for Hillary Clinton and then pull the lever for Trump:
When the AC Nielsen Company selects a new Nielsen family, they disregard the new family’s results for the first three months. The reason: when they feel they are being monitored, people lie about what they are watching. In the first three months, knowing they are being watched, they will tune into PBS. But over time they get tired of pretending. Then it is back to The Kardashians.In all, Rosenblum’s argument is that Trump is good entertainment, even when he’s being despicable, while Clinton is “crap TV.”
Trump’s replacement of Paul Manafort with Breitbart’s Steve Bannon shows that Trump understands how Americans actually think. They think TV. They think ratings. They think entertainment.
We are a TV based culture. We have been for some time now. The average American spends 5 hours a day, every day, watching TV. After sleep, it is our number one activity.
[…]
And Donald Trump is great TV. He knows how to entertain. He understands ratings.
Hillary Clinton is crap TV.
She may be smarter, better prepared, a better politician. It won’t matter. She is terrible entertainment. That’s just how it is. Depressing, but true. He is Kim Kardashian. She is Judy Woodruff. Who gets better ratings?
Who would you rather watch for the next four years?
Honestly...
In 1825, the great French gastronom Brillat de Savarind said, “tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”. Today, in America, we can safely say, “tell me what you watch and I will tell you what you are”.
And what do we watch?
It isn’t The PBS Newshour.
Here’s the problem. We all thought the polls were either lying or being under sampled in 2012, where Obama was leading Mitt Romney. Confident that the American people would see that his second term would be a disaster at home (Obamacare is on the brink of collapse) and abroad (Iran deal), the Right thought Romney would win handily. Election Day was a brutal brick to the face. Yes, Trump is a different kind of candidate. Yes, he’s defied the odds. And yes, even with all of my criticism about him, which you have so eloquently hurled your hate at me over the past few weeks, I’m probably going to vote for him because the thought of Clinton in the White House is just unacceptable. I’m sure more Republicans will come to the same conclusion than sacrificing their vote for a libertarian who supports abortion rights (appalling) or a former CIA agent who has zero chance of winning. Is this a principled vote? No. I admit that. It’s solely being done to stop Clinton, which is going to be the main driver of voter turnout for either side.
On the flip side, regarding the deception with polling, there is an argument for that, though it’s sort of hard to think that this many people are lying in a state, like Virginia, where Clinton is leading by 16 points. That’s a lot of people lying. Then again, as we’ve seen over this cycle, there’s a ton of angry folks out there.
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