Here’s the lead story in this morning’s LA Times:
Donald Trump has gotten a significant boost from his party’s nominating convention last week; now, Hillary Clinton will try for her own….In Trump’s case, the post-convention bounce started to show up in a significant way on Sunday in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak tracking poll of the presidential race. The boost continued to build
for several days and Trump now holds a 7-percentage-point lead, 47% to 40%.
This has already been disappeared from the front page of the web edition, perhaps out of sheer embarrassment. The problem it represents is a widespread one: because this poll is sponsored by the Times, they give it big play and act as if no other poll of the race exists. In fact, it’s a major outlier. The other three most recent polls (Rasmussen, CBS, CNN) basically show the race tied.
This is a bad media habit. They like to hype their own polls without telling their readers what other polls say. It’s understandable, but in this day and age it’s also inexcusable. The Times has almost certainly badly misled its readers here.
POSTSCRIPT: And one other thing. Even in the LAT poll, Trump is up 46.7 percent to 40.6 percent. That’s a 6-point lead, not a 7-point lead.
