A new Atlanta Journal Constitution survey of likely Georgia voters finds convicted felon former President Trump leading President Biden 43 to 38 percent in the state, with brainworm sufferer Robert F Kennedy Jr taking 9 percent of the vote and Libertarian Chase Oliver at 1 percent.
Among respondents under aged 18 to 29, Trump leads the pack at 37 percent support to RFK Jr’s 29 percent, with Biden in third at 12 percent and holy fuck they actually published this garbage. If the AJC and their pollster at UGA can’t be bothered to try harder to sample the under 30s or at the very least attempt to infer some realistic number proportionate to past polling data and actual elections then why in God’s name do they even print it? Is it just sunk cost and group think running up against a deadline to get something, anything out the door before both are in town for the CNN debate ?
You see plenty of the both-sides-y media polling experts wagging the finger at liberals for “crosstab diving,” meaning pointing out unrealistic numbers among subsamples to discredit the topline number as a means of coping with this or that MSM poll showing Trump with a lead over Biden. The explanation is always “you’re still supposed to trust the topline even if the crosstabs are all fucked up” for some goddamned reason that we’re not even going to bother with tracking down and trying to translate because it’s probably bullshit, overly reliant on assumptions that laypeople – even ones without a partisan dog in the fight – are unwilling to buy into, laden with confusing jargon, et cetera.
The Fox News poll that Trump and his minions freaked out over last week showing Biden ahead 50 to 48 percent had a similar problem: Who the hell thinks that Biden is leading Trump by the same margin among rural voters? That they also supposedly found them tied at 38 with urban voter respondents is maybe sort of an offset that helps the topline’s credibility, somewhat.
Can’t really say the same about this AJC/University of Georgia survey. We’re under no illusion that the Peach State is probably more likely than not going to swing back to Trump. Biden only won it by 11,779 votes – a 0.23 percent margin – in 2020 and that’s just the nature of the beast when there are so many headwinds combined with a relentless right wing propaganda machine throwing up smoke about a surge of Black support. That still doesn’t mean the sitting Democratic president is at 12 percent among young voters. It’s fucking ridiculous to the point where if you assume that somehow the other age brackets were also surveyed properly then you might even think that in the real world Georgia is Biden’s to lose – or at the very least tied since it’s dragging Biden down heavily on a topline where he’s only losing by 5 percent. We’re not crossing that bridge simply because if the pollsters couldn’t unfuck the under 30s numbers then there’s no reason to trust their ability to conduct a poll of any demographic or age bracket. They just don’t belong in this business.