CNN’s Data Smearing of Bernie Sanders

Polling data is notoriously unhelpful this far in advance of a primary, especially in a very crowded Democratic field. That said, the media is working very hard to craft a narrative story for their audiences. As per usual, rather than reporting on what is happening, they are trying to shape what is happening by framing it in certain ways.

Headline from recent CNN article reporting on their own, highly skewed, polling data.

CNN recently conducted a poll which they released on March 19th. The data was truly alarming for supporters of Bernie Sanders. According to the poll, Bernie’s support is tanking rapidly. In an article reporting on their own poll (headline depicted above), CNN stated that, “Sanders’ popularity among all voters seems to be declining considerably in the last few months.” They go on to say, “Our new CNN poll puts Sanders favorable rating at 46% compared to an unfavorable rating of 45% among registered voters…. Compare that to where Sanders was at the end of his 2016 presidential bid. Sanders had a 59% favorable rating to 36% unfavorable rating among all voters in a CNN poll taken in June 2016.” Other media sources have now run with the story, as well. The poll also has Biden beating Bernie Sanders by 8 points (28% to 20%) overall.

Three examples from the actual CNN poll showing a lack of data for the ages 18–49. Click the link for the full poll to see at least 7 other examples.

The poll showed Bernie is second place, quite a bit behind Joe Biden, and showed Kamala Harris climbing quickly. Bernie Sanders’ supporters ought to be very worried, unless they took the time to dive into the actual poll. When looking at the poll, one thing becomes very clear. The poll was high skewed toward older voters. How skewed? Every single question that was aimed at Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters was broken down by age, using four basic categories, 18–34, 35–49, 50–65, and above 65. For every single one of the questions, the 18–34 AND the 35–49 categories are listed as “N/A.” In other words, so few people below 50 were polled that they cannot use the data.

It doesn’t take an expert pollster or statistician to know that a poll with numbers like this is going to be highly problematic, especially when taking into account that Bernie’s base of support is much younger than other candidates. In fact, he is kind of famous for it. Politifact looked into this after the 2016 campaign and found that, “It is true that Sanders received more votes from 18- to 30-year-old voters than Clinton and Trump combined.” Maybe CNN purposely constructed a poll to damage Sanders’ image by leaving out his greatest demographic of support. Maybe they are just wildly incompetent. But one thing is certain; this poll is very misleading and needs to be completely publicly retracted by CNN.