There’s a thing Donald Trump does in his rallies, where he starts shouting random “HILLARY BAD” words about some dastardly thing Hillary Clinton has supposedly done, and Trump’s accusations don’t actually make sense, but his supporters start grunting and roaring their approval just the same. This happened twice during Trump’s Monday rally, as he told his people about two new Terrible Hillary Revelations. Both are very dumb, so we will try to be brief here.
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall flags the first one, quoting Trump’s fake outrage over how the Clinton campaign has been “oversampling” in polls, to make it look like they’re winning, when they’re really not winning AT ALL. Here are Trump’s words:
Wikileaks … shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique. That’s happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading. But you see these polls where they’re polling Democrats. How is Trump doing? Oh, he’s down. They’re polling Democrats. The system is corrupt, rigged and broken. And we’re going to change it.
[Cheers and applause]
Thank you, thank you. In an email Podesta says he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling. It’s called voter suppression because people will say, oh, gee, Trump’s down. Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning. These thieves and crook, the immediate, yeah not all of it, not all of it, but much of it — they’re the most crooked — they’re almost as crooked as Hillary. They may even be more crooked than Hillary because without the media, she would be nothing.
Wow, so many words that mean exactly nothing! As Marshall explains, calling this a scandal relies on “people simply not knowing what words mean.” The oversampling Trump refers to, as Marshall explains, is something all normal campaigns do, where IN THEIR INTERNAL POLLING, they dive deep into demographics to learn important information about the electorate. He notes that the emails in question were from 2008, and that, because they’re about INTERNAL POLLING, they by definition “can’t have anything to do with voter suppression.”
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Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group. So let’s stay you have a likely voter poll with 800 respondents. The number of African-Americans in that sample is maybe going to be 100 people, maybe less. 800 people is a decent sample for statistical significance. 100 is not. So if you’re trying to draw conclusions about African-American voters, levels of approval, degree of opposition or support of a candidate, demographic breakdowns, etc. you need to get an ‘over-sample’ to get solid numbers. […]
The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them.
The “scandal” here is that Democrats do actual research on the electorate. It’s like how Hillary #rigs the debates by studying for them.
The second thing Trump mentioned at his rally (and tweeted about) is more complicated, and also more dumb. The Wall Street Journal published a thing Monday with the OMG headline “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife.” OMG INDEED! Except not.
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So is there SCANDAL here? Did Terry McAuliffe give a bunch of money to a lady candidate so she could convince her FBI husband during pillow sexxxy talk time to #rig the investigation for Hillary? Only if calendars and timelines don’t matter, and also only if Terry McAuliffe is psychic. Here, let’s just let the Washington Post piss on the Wall Street Journal‘s Corn Flakes:
[T]he timing is complicated if you’re trying to prove a Clinton email connection. McAuliffe and other state Democrats — led by Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, who, like Jill McCabe, is a physician — recruited her to run for office in March 2015. At the time, her husband worked in the FBI’s Washington Field Office. Revelations about Clinton’s emails came to light that month, but there was no publicly known investigation.
According to the FBI, Andrew McCabe followed agency protocol and consulted with headquarters and with field office ethics authorities as soon as his wife considered running. […]
In July 2015, Andrew McCabe was promoted to Associate Deputy Director of the FBI. McAuliffe’s PAC made small donations to his wife’s campaign in June and August, and the bulk of the contributions in October. She was defeated by Republican incumbent Richard H. Black that November.
By the time McCabe was promoted again — in February 2016, to Deputy Director — and assumed responsibility for the Clinton email investigation, his wife had been out of politics for several months.
McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy said the governor would’ve had to have a time machine to know all the connections that would develop.
Uh, Terry McAuliffe is a Clintonista, so we bet he DOES have a time machine, and he probably does Whitewater and Benghazi every weekend too, because that’s what Clintonistas like to do for fun.
If you’d like to skip all this boring reading and just watch the nice MSNBC man Steve Kornacki explaining to Trump campaign manager idiot Kellyanne Conway what a nothingburger this “scandal” is, you may view the following video. It is a very good example of the mean media being #rigged against Trump, by reporting facts.
In conclusion, this second Clinton scandal is not a scandal, just like the over-sampling thing is not a scandal, and we sure do hope we’re done talking about this now.
[Talking Points Memo / Wall Street Journal / Washington Post]