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Speaking of, I saw a particularly blatant example yesterday:

https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1142442971922653184

I've been following the Andrew Yang campaign since his appearance on the Joe Rogan show and so far as I can tell MSNBC has been at it for months now.

The gall still astonishes me: 20 candidates qualified for the debates, he now polls in the top 8 and betting markets even place him in the top five, and they substitute someone who did not even qualify for the debate for him.




They didn't replace him in the debate, the mistakenly omitted him from a graphic on screen and later corrected it.

He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good. I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.


I didn't mean they dropped him from the debates. Of course they cannot do that, this is already decided by the DNC.

What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him.

Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.

What the hell?

> He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good.

I respectfully disagree with your assessment because it misses the context of these numbers. Top 8 in a field of 24 candidates, most of whom established career politicians with national platforms, is huge for someone who was virtually unknown until only a few months ago. The Rogan podcast in February put him or his ideas on the radar of many people and his twitter acct went from less than 40k to over 400k followers. He qualified for the debate stage earlier than most of the field, and the "paltry" 2% polling (a criterion for the later debate stages) beats many national politicians like Gillibrand etc. It should also be viewed in context with his still very low name recognition. 2% national polling when most Americans still don't even know you exist is remarkable. It means there is huge potential.

>I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.

I was blown away by the sheer amount of sense and rationality when I first heard him speak. It is so unlike a politician, and of course it should be because he isn't one. More than this almost, I was blown away by the responses of other people across the political spectrum. Specifically, it made me see that I had a completely wrong image of Trump voters. He seems exactly what America needs -- a uniter around ideas, not identities -- and I mean this as an outsider who wishes America well (but is deeply concerned about what you are doing to yourself). I really, really hope that more Americans will hear him out and listen with an open mind.


>mistake

This was a targeted attack at one of the most interesting candidates this primary so far and it only serves to suppress a viable alternative to establishment candidates that are featured regularly on the network.


>This was a targeted attack

That's a pretty incredible claim, and requires some pretty serious proof if you expect anyone here to believe that. As a counterpoint, they give plenty of air time to a candidate who is literally running as an independent, who the party machine specifically, systematically disadvantaged last time. Why would they cut Yang if he got ratings?


It also sounds a lot like what people said about Bernie Sanders. Nobody took him seriously, and a lot of the press was along the lines of "lol bernie bros" because left-of-center infighting sells ads. I would be curious to see if the people who say this about Yang said the same about Sanders.

I think the truth is more that news goes for what sells, and a candidate who hasn't yet proven they can sell ads is not worth covering by their metrics. See: the $2b+ plus free press Trump got.[1] He was a known quantity no one expected to win, so covering that spectacle was easy and safe ad money.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...


My take is basically the same. The cable news media covers what their audience watches.

It's also worth noting that while MSNBC is the 2nd or 3rd most watched network (depending on the month) there are only about 1.6 million people regularly watching and that number is down 14% year over year. So even if they snub your candidate, it may not matter much at all.


Same for Ron Paul back in 2012, IIRC. They basically passed over him when they talked about the largest candidates by party.


Polls, as we've discovered in 2016, are also largely fake news. To me Yang seems to be the only sane candidate on the left, and the only one who'd be able to give Trump a hard time.


This needs a citation. There was a lot of people spinning polls or making bad predictions off polls in 2016 (like every election year), but polls are not fake news. They certainly weren't proven to be fake news just because some people were surprised by the outcome.


[flagged]


Hey, posting an LMGTFY is basically always extremely condescending and unnecessary. Here's a link that explains the quality of polling in 2016 and talks about some of the misconceptions both before and after the election: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...


Trump lost the popular vote. National polls captured that perfectly.

The polling failure came in the rust belt where the polling models were not tuned to turnout correctly. Turnoit model is the secret sauce of political polling and the most likely source of failure.

I was betting on the election and this proved an expensive failure for me. However, your notion of deliberately skewed polls by 'oversampling' Democratic areas is utter hogwash.


[flagged]


> I see you're trying to gaslight

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to ban you?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


You don't understand what oversampling means in the context of that email.

They were oversampling to get larger than necessary sub groups so that they could get statistically meaningful results of those subsamples.

As for your first comment swing state polling was more mixed. The RCP polling average gave Trump a lead in Florida. Which he won. It gave him a lead in Ohio which he won, it gave him a lead in Nevada, which he lost.

The polling failure was in the rust belt. Where similar demographics met similar flawed turnout model and result in identical polling failure across the States.

But the irony was the polling failure was over estimating Clinton support not under estimating Trump. Trump got less votes than Romney in Wisconsin yet still won because the Democrats vote collapsed spectacularly.


And of course it wouldn't be Twitter without fake news... sorry you've been had!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/17/which-can...

Edit, fixed AMP version.


I didn't say they dropped him from the debates. Of course they cannot do that, this is already decided by the DNC.

What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him.

Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.


Yup, I've noticed that too. Unfortunately it seems he's making too much sense and others are trying to bury him by not covering him. It was a breath of fresh air when I discovered him. I'm somebody that absolutely hates politics because everyone's saying what people want to hear just to get votes rather and only talking about issues at surface level. You can sense the sincerity in Yang's voice, he's not a lifetime politician, he comes from a social work background, he's going after real root-cause issues, provides data to back up his arguments, talks about issues instead of trying to gain popularity by demeaning the opponent, etc etc.


They did this during the Presidential election as well with Gary Johnson as well.


I see what you did there. Clever.


He's probably not extreme enough. A classic liberal is basically viewed as a republican these days.


A "center" dem from today is 100% a 1980's republican. Their platforms are basically indistinguishable.


1980's Republicans supported sanctuary cities, gay marriage, free college, and socialized health care? No, they didn't.

Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6grXCooL3-M

Listen to Bill Clinton in the 90's basically laying down the Trump line on 'illegal aliens':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnOpGI0qRhA


The Republicans did not shift leftward, they shifted far to the right. In the 1980s, the Dems and Reps overlapped quite a lot. If you go back far enough, they even switched position (Eisenhower was effectively a social democrat, for example, while pre-WW2 Dems were racists). The US didn't even have a meaningful left in the 1980s, and has recently been developing one because people were horrified by how far the country had moved to the right.


You can flatly assert that, but it'd be more interesting if you made an argument or cited some evidence.

On what issues have the Republicans shifted to the right since, say, 1985?


Taxes. Since 1980, they have lowered taxes to ridiculous extremes. Deregulation of businesses. Doing everything to give large businesses, CEOs and large shareholders free reign, while undermining the middle class. Income of the middle class has been pretty much stagnant since about 1980, while incomes of the top 1% has gone through the roof since then. Wealth inequality has gone way up.

I recently read that in 1970, Republicans still supported Basic Income.


This is a comments section. If you want citations, read articles. It's impolite to demand someone here be held to that standard. We know from context that these are opinions, and everyone has the opportunity to provide citations if they want to, but don't demand them.


Sanctuary cities didnt need to be a thing because Republicans didnt care until the 90s. Buchanan wasnt the norm, he was out there. College was practically free then. And ever hear of Nixoncare?

The left today is a caricature of the left in the 60s and early 70s.


The right isn't happy with the right, the left isn't happy with the left, they aren't happy with each other, who is happy in this political landscape?


Bill Clinton and the New Democrats were the rightward shift in the Democratic Party.


As a Canadian, it's crazy that anyone could think of the Democrats as far left. Our Conservative party stopped fighting against gay marriage before the Democrats did.


> Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data:

No it doesn't [1], using data from [2] and [3].

Maybe double check information you get from youtube pundits, especially those with an egregious agenda.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Vital-S...

[3] https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizati...


Atlantic's chart from Poole says the Republicans now are far more right-wing than they were in 1955. That was during Jim Crow and Operation Wetback, when the US's immigration policy was formally, "whites only".

I mean, seriously?

Moreover, they ignored everything since 2012, when the social justice movement really gto going only in 2013 [0]. Which means they're not even really addressing the meaningful recent leftward lurch. This is exactly the kind of obvious manipulation I'm talking about. Leaving out 7 years of data that are the core of the entire argument.

[0] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

The Pew data, which is what Tim Pool was working from, and which comes from an extremely reputable source, stands strong and it reinforces what I've said.


> Leaving out 7 years of data that are the core of the entire argument.

The study was published in 2014, and it's not uncommon to have no finalized data for the year prior on all sources you want to aggregate. There is no grand conspiracy.

> The Pew data, which is what Tim Pool was working from, and which comes from an extremely reputable source, stands strong and it reinforces what I've said.

Again, no it doesn't. And how could it if it was published in 2014, going by your assertion?

Poole used congress voting records, and racism isn't the only (do I even need to state this?) conservative metric.

Regarding your link I don't know what you think it means. That terms and concepts that come into the discourse are discussed more? I'm not shocked.


Republicans are not remotely classic liberals. Unless by "classic" you mean "stuck in the 19th century".




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