With Jon Stewart retired and Stephen Colbert off the air for the summer, the Democrat establishment has picked up the slack in their tried-and-true technique of victory through mockery. Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) included a teenager using the name “Deez Nuts” in a recent presidental poll and showed him polling at 9 percent.
Here’s how The Hill reports it:
The candidate called Deez Nuts — who has filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run for president — is actually a 15-year-old from Iowa named Brady Olson, according to the Daily Beast.
The high school sophomore said he was inspired by news that Limberbutt McCubbins, a Kentucky cat, had filed paperwork for run for president.
Deez Nuts became a social media phenomenon after a Public Policy Polling survey of North Carolina released Wednesday showed that in a race with Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and Republican leader Donald Trump, Deez Nuts would garner 9 percent support.
The polling by Public Policy Polling is what gave inside-the-beltway publication The Hill and other media the excuse to talk about a cat named Limberbutt McCubbins and a teenager named Deez Nuts.
The purpose is obvious: to ridicule the GOP presidential field.
Putting a non-qualified joke candidate on a poll is such a clear violation of professional responsibility by PPP, that it should be a career-ending move for the Democrat-aligned firm. A quick survey of headlines, however, shows that the mockery has found a ready audience in the press.
The CBC trumpeted “Deez Nuts could give Donald Trump a run for his money in U.S. presidential race.” A headline on the Huffington Post’s Politics section blares “‘Deez Nuts’ Is/Are More Popular Than Most Republican Candidates: Poll.”
That HuffPo headline buries the fact that Deez Nuts is also outpolling most Democrat candidates, including Martin O’Malley. HuffPo reports it at the very bottom of the story. That would ruin the joke.
However, Public Policy Polling is no The Onion or “The Daily Show.” They tout themselves as a legitimate polling organization. Before they were talking about cats and teenagers, The Hill called PP “the most accurate pollster in 2012,” and that’s something they pride themselves on. As Breitbart News reported:
PPP had its employees call 957 respondents to ask their view of “Deez Nuts.” PPP touts its reputation as the most accurate polling firm in the 2012 election, though it performed rather poorly in 2014, when Democrats were surprised by Republicans’ strong showing in Senate races.
As a proud progressive organization, PPP is smug about being scientific. A look at PPP’s website shows that they look down their noses at other polling companies and portray themselves as more accurate.
Accurate polling requires the demographic breakdown of a survey to closely resemble the same breakdown for the population you are trying to measure. By beginning their surveys by asking for the “second oldest woman in the household” or some other criteria, traditional pollsters can manipulate their respondents during a poll in order to reach quotas for demographic groups like gender, race, age, etc. IVR polling does not allow PPP to set quotas beforehand, instead we have to work with the data after our survey. To achieve relatively accurate demographic breakdowns we employ weighting schemes.
There is no possible weighting scheme in political polling where including a joke candidate makes any sense, unless the goal is purely unprofessional ridicule.
The attempt to kickstart a meme is more proof of the desperate lengths establishment Democrat groups and their media friends will go to in order to derail serious discussion on issues.
At the end of the day, the joke is on them.
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