New Poll Shows HISTORIC Post-Convention FLOP For Trump And The GOP

The 2016 general election has officially begun. Both party nominating conventions have concluded and the candidates are spreading out across the country soliciting votes. As they do so, the impact of the conventions is beginning to be revealed in the first polling since the balloons dropped. And it’s terrible news for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Donald Trump

Gallup has been surveying post-convention impressions for more than thirty years, but the results of this year’s poll have Trump scraping rock bottom with regard to public approval. In a first for Gallup, the majority of respondents (52%) say that they have a less favorable view of the Republican Party after the conventions than before. By contrast, a plurality of respondents (44%) view Democrats more favorably. Similarly, a majority of Americans (51%) are now saying that they are less likely to vote for Trump, while more voters (45%) say they are more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton following the two conventions. According to Gallup:

“The 2016 Republican convention is the first after which a greater percentage of Americans have said they are ‘less likely’ rather than ‘more likely’ to vote for the party’s presidential nominee.”

That’s a notable milestone. Trump scored a net negative of fifteen percent who were put off by his nightmarish presentation at the most significant campaign event of the election cycle thus far. That vastly under performs the second worst historical showing in this poll previously, which was a net positive of two percent for Mitt Romney in 2012. And thirteen percent of those saying they are less likely to vote for Trump are Republicans.

Gallup also polled reactions to the candidates’ acceptance speeches with results that should be equally worrisome to the Trump camp. Only thirty-five percent of Americans rated Trump’s speech “Excellent/Good.” Another thirty-six percent said it was “Poor/Terrible.” Clinton fared much better by comparison with forty-four percent rating her speech “Excellent/Good,” and only twenty percent holding the negative view. These numbers contribute to Gallup’s conclusions:

“In the short term, it appears the Democratic Party will leave the convention phase better off than before it began. Gallup tracking finds Clinton’s post-convention favorable rating at 44%, up six percentage points from mid-July. That is much higher than Trump’s 32% favorable rating in the days after the Democratic convention. Also, Obama’s job approval rating is now up to 54%, tied for the highest it has been since early 2013.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

These survey results are closely aligned with the Nielsen ratings for the two conventions that showed the Democrats drawing in far more viewers than the Republicans over the four nights of television coverage. Not surprisingly, Americans prefer hope and unity to fear and division. And the failure of the GOP convention, and Trump’s horror show speech, explain why Trump himself is laughably trying to pretend that he had nothing to do with any of it. So now it’s on to the debates, assuming that Trump doesn’t chicken out (for which he is already laying the groundwork).

Donald Trump Is Winning In Every Poll – In His Delusional Mind, That Is

In 2012 there was a mini-movement by Republicans to “unskew” all of the polls that were showing Mitt Romney losing to President Obama. They were convinced that the vast left-wing conspiracy in the media was distorting survey results that would otherwise have shown Romney in the lead. It was an act of self-deception that resulted in their being shocked when Obama actually won reelection just like the polls predicted.

Trumpzilla

The same thing is happening in 2016 as Donald Trump and his PR department (aka Fox News) cherry-pick polls that elevate his standings and ignores, or baselessly slams, those that show him where he actually stands – badly trailing Hillary Clinton. So reading polls is just one more thing at which Donald Trump sucks. As an example of this cognitive lapse take a look at what Trump said about a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll that has him behind Clinton by twelve points: “The @ABC poll sample is heavy on Democrats. Very dishonest – why would they do that? Other polls good!”

That’s funny. Trump had no problem last month with the very same poll when it showed him leading by two points. Back then he retweeted a link heralding the results without any mention of the pollster’s dishonesty.

The past month has seen Trump suffer through an avalanche of horrible failures, including: he repeatedly insulted the Latino judge in his Trump University fraud lawsuit with racist comments; after the Orlando massacre he praised himself and implied that Obama sympathized with the terrorists; he had a dismal financial report showing him with only $1.3 million; he fired his skeevy campaign manager; his GOP colleagues have been abandoning him in droves. And in the meantime Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination and has been enjoying success at unifying the party. No rational person would be surprised by Trump’s declining poll numbers.

But no one ever accused Trump of being rational. In the tweet above he also put forth the fiction that “Other polls good!” Which other polls he was referring to is a mystery. Here is every poll followed by RealClear Politics for the month of June. Notice that Clinton is ahead in every one of them. On second thought, that is good.

Trump polls

This is fairly typical for Trump. When he has a momentary spike by in popularity he declares victory and lavishes himself with praise. He is utterly blind to anything less than unqualified acclaim. And when neither is handy he latches onto laughably phony sources that he can count on for partisan drivel. Take for instance his promotion of a ludicrous poll that said he “Leads Big With Latinos.” And just as absurd was this one reporting that “Minorities Line Up Behind” him. And then there was the time that a Wall Street Street Journal/NBC poll showed him behind Ted Cruz in the primary. Trump whined that “I never do well” with that poll. Except that he was ahead in five of the six previous polls by the Journal. Only someone with a deeply corrupted view of reality could believe this nonsense.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Unfortunately, the reality-challenged demographic to whom Trump appeals actually exists. They are small, but annoyingly loud. And they will believe whatever their Orange Lord tells them. As he said himself, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support. He’s frighteningly right about that. It’s the Kool-Aide chugging wing of the Republican Party and they must not be allowed to prevail in November.

Twidiots: Donald Trump And Sarah Palin Vie For Stupidest Tweet Of The Day

In the midst of a campaign season that has seen some startlingly ignorant remarks by the most fact-challenged assembly of Republican candidates and pundits, two of the party’s most laughable dolts are challenging each other for pinhead primacy. The face-off between Donald Trump and Sarah Palin may prove to be an epic contest by the legends of loony.

Trump/Palin Tweets

In one corner we have Donald Trump. The recognized leader in marathon lying, his versatility also makes him a contender for Stupidest Tweet.

In his relentless efforts to congratulate himself Trump posted a tweet giving thanks for the results of a poll that actually showed him losing to Hillary Clinton 49-51. As if that weren’t bad enough, what makes this particularly notable as epically dimwitted is that the poll is from the ultra-rightist TV network One America News (OAN) and was conducted by a blatantly biased pollster, Gravis Marketing. So even when his polls are conservatively skewed he’s losing, but in his ego-driven obliviousness he still finds it worthy of celebration.

Trump is drawn to polls that have no credible reputation and whose results are obviously bogus. In the past he has linked to polls that showed him leading with Latinos, with African-Americans, and with a higher favorability than Clinton in New York. But in this latest non-credible tweet he isn’t even leading. Polls that conduct accurate surveys of public opinion are giving Trump his worst numbers to date, including one that shows him with an unfavorable rating of 70 percent, the worst ever recorded by that poll.

In the other corner we have Sarah Palin, the word salad queen who thinks Africa is a country and whose “death panel” fantasy was PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year for 2009.

Palin’s entry in the Stupidest Tweet contest has a high degree of difficulty considering she is tackling head on the alleged stupidity of President Obama. Her tweet says that “OBAMA IS A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID.” And right off the bat, she demonstrated her own lack of mental acuity by posting a broken link that led to a missing Facebook page. Undaunted, I navigated to her commentary on Facebook and found a screed lambasting the President for “Exploiting a sick, evil, ideological-driven attack on Americans to further your twisted anti-Second Amendment mission.”

Palin was outraged that Obama had the audacity to address the dangers of terrorists having easy access to assault weapons shortly after a terrorist killed 49 people and wounded 53 more with an assault weapon. She accused him of insinuating that the Orlando shooter represented all gun owners, which he never did. Then she demanded of him to “Forget your asinine gun control, do your job and engage in Islamic terrorist control.” Apparently she is unaware the Obama has been fully engaged in the fight against terrorism and has achieved significant progress while she and her ilk have done nothing but complain that he doesn’t say the three magic words, “radical Islamic terrorism” (as if that would change anything).

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

This Battle of the Lame-Brained promises to be an exciting spectacle as the election proceeds toward its November conclusion. And these demonstrations of Olympian idiocy will surely not be the last contenders. We have two worthy combatants who are determined to set new records for dumbf*ckery. So stay tuned for much more to come.

Stupid Polling Tricks: New Yorkers Hate Donald Trump But He Thinks They Adore Him

The Republican Party must be ready to gnaw off its leg after ten months of Donald Trump stinking up the place. He has engaged in bitter battles with his GOP opponents and the Republican National Committee. He has assembled the worst record on honesty of any candidate in decades (see the Trump Bullshitopedia). And he’s done this while offending virtually every voter constituency in the nation. That may account for the public’s aversion to him as evidenced in this poll from Fox News (that’s right, Fox News). But, as if that weren’t enough to produce an enduring nausea, Trump is also dumb as fence post. And he’s making the most of it.

Donald Trump Stupid

Trump has shown that he has no grasp of the issues that face the country. He rarely responds to a question with anything resembling coherence, much less substance. What he does say is a third grade level simplification that would shame an actual third grader. And he is not only ignorant of policy matters, he doesn’t have the vaguest idea of how the political system works. He has spent most of the last week whining about a delegate process that has been known to every candidate for years.

This weekend Trump demonstrated again how shallow his understanding of campaign matters is. He gleefully tweeted about a poll that blared the headline: “BOOM! Trump Holds 66% Favorable Rating in New York – Leads Hillary Clinton by 19 Points in Empire State.”

Anyone who reads that tweet and thinks there is anything remotely associated with reality in it should not be allowed use pointy scissors. A cursory examination reveals it to be a complete farce. The polling organization is Liberty Opinion Research, a little known conservative operation with no discernable credentials. Its president is Nick Langworthy, who is also the chairman of the Erie County Republican Committee and has endorsed Trump for president.

Digging into the internals of the poll shows that the respondents were narrowly drawn to achieve a positive result for Trump. They are an exclusive lot that is 94% white, 61% conservative, and 48% of them are 66 years or older. So what you have is a bunch of old, right-wing, white guys expressing their devotion to an old, right-wing, white guy.

Trump seems to enjoy posting links to dubious polling that falsely heralds him as the second coming. Last February he linked to a ridiculous poll that claimed that he “leads big with Latinos.” And back in December he did the same thing with a laughable survey that said that “minorities are lining up behind” him. I guess when you appeal to a dimwitted throng of cult worshipers you can say anything.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

For the record, Clinton is beating Trump by 21.2% in the RealClear Politics average of polls for New York. So the preferences of the people of New York are not in doubt. It isn’t even close. But Trump is dumb enough to believe that the voters in his home state adore him, when they obviously do not. And his glassy-eyed disciples will also cling to his tweet as if it were the gospel truth. It would be comical if it weren’t so pathetically sad.

Fox News Poll: Donald Trump Is An Ignorant Snot Who Nobody Likes

The Republican primary this year has affirmed what many people have known about the party for decades. It is dominated by boorish, judgmental, demagogues who are determined to deceive the American public into believing that they benefit when the rich get richer. The emergence of a billionaire reality TV game show host as their front-runner puts an exclamation point at the end of that sorry state of affairs.

foxnews-poll-trump

Now a new poll from (of all places) Fox News tells us more of what we already knew if we were paying attention. Donald Trump really is an ignorant blowhard with the highest unfavorable rankings ever recorded. Fox News begins their article detailing the poll results saying that…

“Majorities of American voters think Republican front-runner Donald Trump lacks the knowledge, temperament, and the likeability to be an effective president.”

No shit! This has been obvious since Trump announced his candidacy with a speech that demeaned immigrants as rapists and criminals. It has been manifest in his relentless insults directed at minorities, liberals, women, and even his own party peers. Still, it’s useful having confirmation of this from the media mouthpiece for conservative politics and Republican PR, Fox News.

The survey asked several questions related to the fitness of the candidates to hold the office of president, and Trump fared dismally in every one of them. On whether the candidate has the knowledge to serve effectively as president, Trump scored lowest with only 38% saying that he did. Clinton had a large majority of 63%, and Sanders also had a majority of 58%.

On whether or not the candidate has the integrity to serve effectively as president, Trump flopped with a mere 40%, still way below his Democratic rivals: Clinton 48%, Sanders 70%.

On whether or not the candidate has the temperament to serve effectively as president, Trump underperformed again with an embarrassing 33%. Clinton and Sanders pulled in 62% and 68% respectively.

Finally, the survey asked if the candidate is likeable enough to serve effectively as president. And again, to no one’s surprise, Trump sat at the bottom with 41%, while Clinton drew 52% and Sanders soared at 71%.

On a couple of other issues addressed in the survey, Trump was similarly situated at the low end. Americans would trust both Clinton and Sanders more (53%) when negotiating with Vladimir Putin, than Trump (40%). And when asked about whether the candidate would make them proud, the highest response to “Not at all” went to Trump (56%). And while the poll found that 64% of the respondents think that the Democrats have been “generally polite and respectful” throughout the primary, 80% of them think that the Republicans have been generally rude and disrespectful.

It’s significant to note that this poll is not just an expression of general distaste for all politicians, because the abysmal numbers for Trump are unique. They are matched by majorities with favorable views of the Democrats. There isn’t an across the board anti-government sentiment.

So according to the Fox News poll, the leading light of the GOP, and the standard bearer for Republican politics, is regarded by majorities of the population as too ignorant, too lacking in integrity, too temperamental, and too obnoxious to be President of the United States.

What a surprise. The man who can’t articulate a single coherent thought on domestic or foreign policy; who insults anyone who has the temerity to criticize him; who whines like a baby whenever things don’t go exactly the way he wants; who advocates violence against protesters at his rallies; who brags incessantly about how awesome he thinks he is; that man is not particularly well thought of by most Americans. That’s a very good sign of the astute character judgment of the American people.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

However, it’s also a very frightening sign of the deranged minds of the people who are such loyal followers of the Trump cult. Where will they go when he eventually flames out? Right back into the mainstream of the Republican Party with the rest of the zombie Tea Party fanatics and white supremacists. And that is a very bad sign indeed.

Despite A Week Of Fox News Bashing, Obama’s Approval Rating Hits 3-Year High

It may be time to send Fox News a thank you card for helping President Obama to achieve his highest level of approval since December of 2012. Gallup’s latest numbers show Obama with a 53% approval rating, and 44% disapproval (as of 3/25/2016). Of course, it wasn’t for lack of trying to smear the President with anything they could dig up. Apparently they just underestimated the American people’s appreciation for a leader who engages in positive forward movement, rather than the sort of juvenile antics that are being showcased by Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail.

Barack Obama

The past week was full of the sort of poll-shifting events that often shape the public’s opinion of national leaders. And true to form, Fox News worked rigorously to turn those events into negative fodder for their Obama-phobic audience. They began by brazenly politicizing the tragic terrorist attacks in Brussels. Various Fox News characters desperately tried to blame Obama for the bombing. They asserted that his strategy for combating ISIS was so weak that it encouraged more attacks. However, the truth is that Obama’s counter-terrorism efforts have seriously degraded the capabilities of the enemy, including killing more than half of their top commanders. ISIS has lost 40% of the territory it once held in Iraq. Many experts regard resorting to terrorism as a sign of weakness by combatants who are unable to make military gains.

Then Fox criticized Obama for continuing his historic visit to Cuba. They would have preferred that he tucked his tail between his legs and scurried back to D.C., as if there were anything he could do there that he couldn’t do on the road. Why they think that it would be a good thing for the President to exhibit fear and panic in the wake of terrorist act (whose purpose is to incite fear and panic) is a mystery. And they never criticized presidents Bush or Reagan who both remained on vacation following similar incidents.

There has also been a dust up in Washington concerning the vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by Antonin Scalia’s sudden death. Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a widely admired moderate judge who has been praised by Republicans in the past. But now they are clinging to an imaginary constitutional clause prohibiting presidents from doing anything in the last year of their term. The rhetoric on Capital Hill has been decidedly hostile toward Obama simply because he is complying with his constitutional obligations. GOP senators have accused him of trying to “shove” his nominee “down their throats,” and attempting to “pack the court.” All of which is nonsense. He is only asking them to do their jobs as stipulated by law.

Finally, the Republican primary has been a non-stop Obama-bashing extravaganza. For the past eight months every GOP candidate has bitterly castigated the President as inept, dangerous, arrogant, feckless, and even treasonous. They simultaneously claim that he has done more than any other president to harm America, but also that he has done nothing for his entire term. Likewise, he has shown brilliant cunning in his plots to destroy the nation while also being an utter fool who was never up to the job. That kind of schizophrenic contradiction really has be worked at.

So it must be frustrating for the GOP to observe that while all of these heavy-handed and baseless condemnations were being flung at Obama, the American people were warming up to him more than at any other time than in the past three years. By significant majorities they approve of his opening diplomatic relations with Cuba. They want the Senate to confirm Judge Garland for the Supreme Court. And their opinions of the Republican contenders for the GOP nomination range from embarrassment to disgust (even among Republicans).

President Obama must be doing something right. And Fox News is demonstrating that they have far less influence on the electorate than like to pretend. They have yet to report these latest presidential approval numbers from Gallup, even though they gleefully announce any polling down tick with a flashy “ALERT” accompanied by whooshes and gongs to make sure their dimwitted viewers are paying attention.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

So the Fox audience will remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that Obama is riding high in the polls, and will continue to wallow in the fantasy that Ted Cruz or Donald Trump are going to trample the Democratic candidate in the fall. Just like they did in 2012 when they were lied to by Fox into believing that Mitt Romney was going to win by landslide. That’ worked out pretty well, didn’t it?

Liberal Media My Ass: Hillary Clinton’s Alleged Polling Woes

The latest round of polling has hit the press with curiously coordinated reactions. Nearly every mainstream news outlet chose to spin the results as negative for Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton

To be sure, Clinton’s favorability has suffered in the past few weeks due to relentless bashing by more than a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls and an unending stream of baseless but damaging stories about her email. However, the uniformity of the media presentation is hardly representative of the reality. Here is how the press is covering the news:

  • Washington Times: Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable rating approaches record territory
  • ABC News: Clinton Goes Under Water
  • Breitbart News: Gallup: Hillary Clinton’s Favorability at All-Time Low
  • Wall Street Journal: Hillary Clinton Hits Lows on Favorability, Trustworthiness
  • Reuters: Clinton’s favorability ratings lowest since 2001
  • The Hill: Poll: Clinton’s favorability tumbles
  • NBC News: Hillary Clinton’s Popularity Drops Sharply in NBC/WSJ Poll
  • Fox News: Fox News Poll: Clinton popularity drops

While there is nothing wrong with reporting the facts in polling, it is misleading if the reporters don’t put the numbers into context. And an examination of the poll results paints a very different picture of the campaign. Just using the most recent Fox News poll as an example, Clinton’s “low” favorability rating is still higher than every Republican in the poll except for one (Ben Carson). It is not a trivial side issue to note that Clinton scores better than the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, and trounces him in a head-to-head match-up. But that is not considered newsworthy by the so-called “liberal” media.

What’s more, the press didn’t think it was important to report that every Republican’s unfavorables are at their all-time highs. Why is it news that Clinton’s favorabilty is suffering, but it isn’t news that all of her potential rivals are suffering as badly or worse? This is something the media has been doing for years with President Obama. They leap at every opportunity to report any drop in his popularity (which currently stands at about 47%) and how it will hamper the success of his agenda with Congress. What they leave out is that Congress has a favorability in the mid-teens, which should give the President a significant advantage.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Every single one of the headlines above could just as easily have read “Clinton And All Republicans Favorability At Or Near All-Time Lows,” but that would have meant engaging in honest journalism rather than deliberately misleading horse-race tabloidism. So the next time you see a spate of negative headlines hammering Clinton, remember that there is almost certainly more to the story than the media is telling you. And what they are usually leaving out is that, no matter how much people dislike Clinton, that hate Republicans even more.

New Poll Shows 18% Of Republicans Are Ignorant Dupes With Severe Mental Decay

There is much being made about a new CNN poll that shows Donald Trump leading his GOP rivals in the race for the Republican nomination for president. However, there is less substance in these numbers than the media is pretending there is. What is astonishing is just how shallow the media analysis of these polls are. The ranking at which Trump finds himself can easily be explained by the clinical dementia of today’s Republican (Tea) Party. And despite these polls, Trump will never get the nomination or reside in the White House.

trump-house

Let’s take a closer look. Trump currently has 18% of the support of the GOP voters. The truth that everyone is ignoring is that that’s an awfully pitiful expression of support. It means that 82% are not supporting him. Why does anyone in the press think that’s a positive showing?

Nevertheless, the media is heralding Trump as the runaway GOP leader with his measly 18% of support. For perspective, note that Bernie Sanders, in his campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, is pulling support from 19% of Democratic voters. Yet the press is dismissing him as trailing Clinton badly. So Sanders has more support among Democrats than Trump does among Republicans, but the schizophrenic media declares Sanders a loser and Trump a phenomenon.

This same schizophrenia is shown in how Republican operatives and pundits portray the relationship between the media and the candidates. If Clinton declines to do an interview or makes reporters walk behind a rope line so they don’t interfere with her interactions with voters, she is condemned as being anti-media and disrespectful to the fine men and women of the press who are struggling mightily to bring truth to the American people. But if Trump or any other Republican bashes the press or denies them access (as Trump just did to the Des Moines Register), they are cheered for putting those unethical press weasels in their place.

Getting back to Trump’s placement in the GOP polls, the explanation for it is that there is a demographic in the Republican electorate that can best be described as batshit insane. And Trump has managed to secure a near monopoly on that addle-brained GOP faction. Prior polling has revealed that a significant subsection of the GOP holds some hysterically idiotic views. For instance:

Having established that a fair percentage of Republicans embrace a measure of dumbassedness in frightening proportions, the fact that a particularly knuckleheaded candidate has corralled them into his camp is not especially surprising. In fact, it would be surprising if these dimwits did not coalesce around a similarly daft contender, just as they did in the last election cycle with Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, et al.

Consequently, Trump’s confederacy of dunces is sufficient in numbers to rise above his rivals, so long as there’s a lot of them. That’s because when you divide the remaining Republicans who are not wacko-birds (h/t John McCain) among the fifteen other candidates, there aren’t enough of them left to surpass the Trump/crazy constituency. That does not mean that Trump has a commanding lead. It means that there are way too many players on the field diluting the results for each of them. As they whittle down to a more manageable number, the 82% of non-Trump supporters will disperse to other candidates who will then tower over his paltry flock.

While the media is obsessing over the fake Trump “dominance,” they are missing some real news in the same CNN poll. For starters, they missed that Trump has the highest unfavorables of all candidates, Republican and Democratic. Meanwhile, Clinton has the highest favorables of all candidates, Republican and Democratic. Furthermore. Clinton is beating every Republican matched against her (Trump loses by 18 points). And the icing on the cake: Sanders is also beating the Republicans in head-to-head matchups (Trump loses by 20 points).

News Corpse Presents: The ALL NEW 2nd volume of
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

This is what passes for political reporting these days. Is it any wonder that people hold the media in such low esteem? They are littered with lightweights who seem to have no analytical skills or historical memory. If they did they would not be so shocked that a loudmouth buffoon has earned the admiration of the GOP’s most radical, racist, and ignorant bloc of voters, while four out of five of the poll’s Republican respondents reject him.

GOPee Yew: What The Media Isn’t Telling You About Obama’s Poll Numbers

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (pdf) has some decidedly bad news for President Obama. The American people, according to this survey, are losing patience with the President and expressing it with low opinions of his job performance, foreign policy, and leadership. It is a distinct concern for him as his administration heads into its final two years.

That said, the news isn’t all bad. But far be it for the media to put the results in context so that people get a balanced perspective of the nation’s mood. In addition to the floundering numbers, there are some areas that ought to produce some optimism for the President and those aligned with his policies. First among them is the fact that, while Obama’s numbers are nothing to write home about, his political rivals are doing so much worse that may want to run away from home.

NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll

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Both the President and his party are putting the Republicans to shame. He is 30% more popular than the Republican Party, and nearly 50% more popular than the laughably inane Tea Party. If his presidency is over, as some right-wing pundits are gleefully claiming, what does that mean for conservatives?

And that’s not all. When asked which party they prefer to control Congress, respondents chose Democrats over Republicans by 45% to 43%. The poll also reports that progressive positions on prominent issues are far more popular than those of conservatives. For instance, respondents support the Common Core education initiative 59/31. They believe that immigration helps rather than hurts the nation 47/42. They advocate action on climate change 61/37. They approve of Obama’s recent move to set strict carbon dioxide emission limits 67/29.

Clearly the electorate is in a bad mood, and they are taking it out, with justification, on their representatives. But when directly asked about solutions to the problems that affect them most, they consistently respond with agreement for the liberal agenda.

So why doesn’t the press report that? This is the so-called “liberal” media we’re talking about. Apparently they are not as driven by partisanship as right-wingers would have you believe with all of their childish carping. More likely the media is driven by ratings and revenue. In that regard, conflict and drama have always been a bigger draw than harmony. It’s the same reason that local news features murders and car chases, rather than more uplifting stories.

Obama has some work to do to counteract the effect of the relentlessly negative coverage he receives. Even the arrest of a suspect in the Benghazi attack drew absurd criticisms from Fox News and other wingnut media. But in the interim, it is important to look below the surface to see the whole story. And what this survey is telling us is that if Democrats run on progressive policies they are more likely to achieve success at the polls later this year and in 2016.

Fox News Banishes Their Own Polls From Fox Nation

There is a conspicuous trend developing at Fox News that indicates the depth of their desperation in light of the momentum President Obama is enjoying coming out of the party conventions. They are so afraid of an Obama victory in November that they are burying their own polls when the results show Obama leading.

Most recently, the Fox News poll published yesterday gave Obama a pronounced lead of 48% to 43% for Romney. It included a 12 point swing in Obama’s favor by Independents, and the GOP advantage in enthusiasm has evaporated. In virtually every category of voter attitude Obama held a lead: On foreign policy (+15), education (+14), Medicare (+11), health care (+9), terrorism (+8), immigration (+4), taxes (+3), making the country a better place to live (+2), honesty (+11), steady leader (+10 ), the right experience (+7), keeping promises (+4), and strong moral values (+2). Romney led only in helping small businesses (+2) and understanding capitalism (+25).

There has been no mention of this poll on the Fox News community web site, Fox Nation. And this is not the first time that’s occurred. Last month the Fox Nationalists posted the results of a Rassmussen poll that put Romney in the lead. The article neglected to say that three other polls released the same day had Obama ahead, and one of those was a Fox News poll that put Obama up by nine points.

Fox Nation August Poll

The same thing occurred last May when Fox News published a poll featuring an Obama lead of seven points. The Fox Nationalists missed that one as well. But it’s not as if they don’t like to post poll results. Take a look at the frequency with which they publish polls that have Romney out in front:

Fox Nation May Polls

Fox News is acting like a PR agency that is dutifully serving their client. Always hype good news and squelch bad news. It doesn’t change the reality of the electoral contest, but it keeps their audience hypnotized with the sort of disinformation that will eventually bite them in the ass. When Obama wins in November, Fox’s viewers will be stunned, having no idea that Obama was ever competitive. They currently are convinced that he has no chance of winning and that misconception is affirmed by Fox News pundits who assure their glassy-eyed disciples that Obama is toast. Bill O’Reilly even hosted Dick Morris (the world’s worst pundit) to predict that Romney would win big, and to mercilessly rip apart the poll conducted by the people who are paying his salary.

When the folks at Fox are running so scared that they choose to hide the polls they spend so much money on, you know they are trembling severely. More importantly, they are exposing themselves as frauds who are more interested in deception than journalism. But then, that isn’t exactly news.