Veteran pollster Pat Caddell joined Wednesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM to discuss the latest presidential polls and the continued fallout from Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment.
Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow asked Caddell if he thought Donald Trump’s five-point lead in the latest L.A. Times tracking poll was credible. Caddell described the L.A. Times methodology of querying a panel of voters daily as an “experimental approach,” and said he was “fascinated” by the results.
“I think it’s a credible approach,” he said. “Certainly I have a lot more interest in it than I do, for instance, the Washington Post poll, which is historically, in every election, cannot get the – some polls tilt one way, I guess, some tilt the other. This has always tilted over its sampling, overly Democratic. It’s a 10-point margin in their last poll, which showed Trump down 5. So if you take it to where it is, at best, basically a 5-point Democratic Party preference edge, you had basically a dead heat, but you know the Washington Post can’t report something like that.”
He noted that the L.A. Times doesn’t poll on Saturday, so the “big shift” from Clinton +1 to Trump +5 took less than a week. “We’re going to know a lot more in a couple of days. I’m really anxious to see the latest numbers we get out of our poll that’s in the field now,” he said, referring to the Breitbart News/Gravis poll, which he oversees.
Caddell expected to see the “impact of the health questions” about Hillary Clinton in the next Breitbart News poll, particularly the “stunning revelations” that “she fainted several times, the FBI statement that she claimed, because of her concussion, that she couldn’t remember some of her briefings and things.”
“She’s fit and ready to go, folks,” he said sarcastically.
Furthermore, he thought Clinton’s polling could suffer from “the whole thing about transparency, and not being forthcoming, and then her comment – ‘Well, we didn’t think it was that important,’ basically, when she was asked on CNN, ‘we didn’t think it was a big deal.’”
He noted how so many doctors, including those who have called into Breitbart News Daily, say “the first thing they should have done is taken her to a hospital” after Clinton collapsed on Sunday, making her refusal to do so into a question about her judgment, in the minds of voters.
Caddell didn’t want to forget about the other big Clinton story from the weekend, her statement that half of Trump’s voters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”
“They’re going crazy on ‘Morning Joe’ this morning, because Mike Pence wouldn’t use the word ‘deplorable,’” he observed. “This is the usual game here. We’ll come up with a narrative word, and then we’ll start down every list of people in the world.”
“She attacked the American people. She didn’t attack David Duke,” Caddell stated firmly. “Pence denounced him in even harsher terms, but because he won’t play their game, which is to kind of suck you in, you just keep sliding into it.”
Caddell tore into the bipartisan political establishment for backing up Clinton’s arrogance:
The Establishment has really doubled down, because they are saying, ‘We really think you’re all a bunch of racists and bigots, and you’re too stupid to know what you’re doing if you’re voting for Trump. These things are, I think, not resonating well. This shows you how out of touch, not just Hillary Clinton – the thing Hillary Clinton said, which was, as we now know, a prepared remarks, which I was stunned at, the day before yesterday, to find out.
What Trump needs to make clear, I think here – or will, I assume – is that this isn’t just the view of Hillary Clinton and her campaign. This is a view of the entire governing establishment of America… and particularly the media, which is no longer a media devoted to fact, it is an outrider, it’s the assassination squad of the governing elite.
It’s not just Democrats against Republicans. That’s the structure we’re told we have to deal with. If the election now comes into focus, it’s a battle between the mainstream of the country and its political media overlords of the political class. And that’s why they’re hysterical. I mean, they’re hysterical because their power is in threat… it kind of makes their entire careers look like, I’m sorry, it’s a lost cause.
Marlow saluted Caddell as one of the first longtime media fixtures to understand how thoroughly the media has betrayed its audience, to curry favor with the political class. Caddell was quick to say he was not alone.
“I like to say the most interesting group of people are those of us who have defected from the evolution of the political elite,” he said. “My position is, I don’t check my voter registration card to figure out today which of my principles I’m allowed to believe in. It’s useless to watch these discussions on TV… a lot of the stuff is the pseudo-Republicans, I mean, they’re Bush Republicans who hate Trump, and they’re part of the Establishment.”
Caddell defined that Establishment as “a political class which continues to think that they were the supreme and that they were self-perpetuating, picking and choosing only people who would be like them and think like them, and imposing on the American people what they wanted, which benefited them, but not the people, and never being held to any standards of success or failure.”
“The American people have every right — this is what I’ve said about the ‘deplorables’ statement and the support for it. It is an attack on the legitimate right of the American people, the legitimacy of their criticism, and their feeling that the political leadership has failed them,” he concluded.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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