Pat Caddell Blasts Reuters’ Back-Rigging Polls to Show Clinton Winning
political polling pioneer Pat Caddell said the Reuters news service was guilty of an unprecedented act of professional malpractice after it announced Friday it has dropped the “Neither” option from their presidential campaign tracking polls and then went back and reconfigured previously released polls to present different results with a reinterpretation of the “Neither” responses in those polls.
“This comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results,” said the legendary pollster and political consultant. “I suppose you can get away with it in polling because there are no laws. But, if this was accounting, they would put them in jail.”
Caddell said he is confused by Reuters’ motivation.
“On July 25, they originally reported: Trump 40.3 percent and Clinton 37.2 percent, which was a Trump margin of 2.8,” he said. “They have recalculated that now–which I have never heard of–they changed that data, to be: Clinton 40.9 and Trump 38.4, which is a 2.5 margin for Clinton.”
The
July 25 Reuters poll now shows a result that reflects a 5.3 percentage point flip from the previously published results, he said.
“Now look at
July 26,” he said. “On July 26 they had Trump at 41.5 percent and Hillary at 36.3. That was a 5.2 Trump margin. Then, in the new calculation, they claim that Clinton was 41.1 percent, Trump was 37.5, and the margin was 3.6 for Clinton. Same poll. Two different results. Recalculated, after you’ve announced the other results.”
“What you get is an 8.8 percentage point margin change, almost nine points swinging from one candidate, based on some phony, some bizarre allocation theory that you claim you know where these people are or you are just leaving them out,” he said. “I actually believe they are allocating them because they are claiming they are really Clinton voters and they are using something to move them to Clinton.”
The propaganda polls are actually the opposite of poll-polls, he said. Instead of figuring out what public opinion reality is, the propaganda polls are created to change existing public opinion reality.
“This idea of ‘We need a poll to give the result we want’ to fit either our ideological or political needs is beyond dangerous,” he said.
“It is dangerous because it drives the news coverage and it is all by design now, which is why everyone is in such shock at what Reuters did.”
