Trump Has Tapped Not into Anger but an Incompetent Press

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Monday October 19, 2015 · 3:35 PM PDT

2015/10/19 · 15:35

I'm tired of hearing our lazy, superficial, incompetent press talk about Donald Trump having tapped into an angry electorate spoiling for dramatic change. A mid-October, NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll (http://www.nbcnews.com/...) found that Trump was the favorite of 25% of “GOP primary voters.” According to the Pew Research Center (http://www.people-press.org/... ), in 2014 about 23% of the electorate “identified” as Republican. It’s never easy to tell how a poll samples (which is a disgrace given that nothing else matters if they screw up the sampling), but if we take this on its face, Trump is the favorite of 25% of 23%, meaning that he has tapped into a vein of anger that goes as deep as 5.7% of us. If we add in Carson’s 22% of GOP voters, we’re up to 11% of us. These are the numbers driving all this drivel about a change election and angry voters.

At the end of George W Bush’s administration, when the economy was in freefall due to years of deregulation, when we were losing 800,000 jobs per month (http://www.cbpp.org/...), and when we were trapped in two wars, one of which clearly was a war of choice, there still were about 25% of voters who thought George W Bush was doing a bang-up job: Bushie, you’re doing a heck of a job (http://www.gallup.com/...). Keep in mind that this was before Obama’s illegitimate reign of terror opened everyone’s eyes to how good a president George W Bush had been. Thus, fully 25% of voters had voluntarily severed their lifeline to reality. Yet, Trump grabs headlines, now, for tapping into a vein of anger reaching almost 6% of voters.

This not to be blamed on nor is it even about the voters. This is about our lazy, superficial, incompetent press sinking ever lower. During elections, all they ever report is polls, but they can’t be bothered with the mechanics of the polling because some shiny object just flashed in their field of view. Ben Franklin said that the founders had given us a republic – if we could keep it. Between one network dedicated to misinformation and the mainstream press dedicated to dumbing everything down as far as possible, Ben said a mouthful.

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