It's the Media

A report supported by Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University finds no substantial post-debate shift in the race between Trump and Biden.

Given the wall-to-wall coverage in the media of President Biden’s fitness in the past two weeks, you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking support for Biden has all but disintegrated. But a new report shows that any shift in support is likely due to the media coverage and not Biden’s debate performance.

We compared the voting preferences of respondents who had previously participated int he April-May wave of CHIP50 to those of the same individuals reported during the week following the June 27 US presidential debate. Our results indicate a modest churn of voters’ preferences, with no substantial shift in the race between Biden and Trump.

The predominant pattern we see in the data is stability in voters’ preferences. Overall,94% of those who chose Biden and 86% of those who chose Trump in our May survey still preferred the same candidate after the debate. There was a small rate of change fromBiden to Trump or vice versa–less than 3% shifted in either direction. We observed more churn between those who favored either Biden or Trump and the “Other” category. About 4% of Biden’s and 6% of Trump’s supporters in the earlier wave shifted to “Other” post-debate. At the same time, 6% of “Other” shifted to Biden, and another 6% shifted to Trump.

It’s no wonder there’s concern among democrats. In the past 13 days, the media has misquoted Senator Blumenthal:

The media misrepresented comments from Nancy Pelosi:

The Washington Post mixed up Rep Lieu and Rep Takano:

And they ran with lies about the White House Medical Unit Neurologist:

It’s blatantly clear that any movement in the polls is solely due to the media coverage of the debate, and not the debate itself. More from the latest report:

The evidence available from CHIP50 does not substantiate the view that the presidential race shifted away from Biden in the immediate aftermath of the recent debate. We also suggest that media reporting on the presidential race should not interpret small apparent changes in voter preferences as reflecting a real change in the state of the race (where“small” should roughly be interpreted as less than twice the margin of error of a survey). For pollsters who use a panel (that is, the same respondents at multiple points in time), we would also recommend reporting the rate at which respondents have shifted among different possible responses.

You can read the entire report here.

~ AG