In an effort to gaslight the American public who watched the vice presidential debate on Wednesday evening, CNN has released an “instant poll” showing that the majority of debate watchers believed that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) defeated Vice President Mike Pence. Apparently, it isn’t just Harris and Biden who think you are stupid. 

The poll conducted shortly after the debate concluded that about 59 percent of respondents believed that Harris was the victor while only 38 percent favored Pence. According to CNN, “Those results roughly matched voters’ expectations heading into the debate. In interviews conducted before the debate, 61% of those same voters said they expected Harris to win, 36% thought Pence would.”

The alleged poll also showed that the senator improved her favorability rating with the individuals who watched. It remained the same for Vice President Pence, whose favorability “stood at 41% in both pre- and post-debate interviews.” 

The supposed poll claimed that participants believed that Harris “did the better job defending her running mate.” 

From CNN:

“Most debate watchers said Harris did the better job defending her running mate (64% Harris to 34% Pence), that she seemed more focused on uniting the country (62% to 34%), was more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you (61% to 38%) and that she expressed her views more clearly (57% to 39%). Most said Pence spent more time attacking his opponent (56%) than thought the same of Harris (36%).”

The problems with this poll are apparent, aren’t they? Even Vox, an uber-left wing news site, admitted that “quick polls of who won a political debate are necessarily imperfect indicators.” A quick glance at the methodology used to conduct the survey reveals some obvious flaws with this poll. It states that “Among the entire sample, 38% described themselves as Democrats, 29% described themselves as Republicans, and 33% described themselves as independents or members of another party.”

I spoke with my colleague and RedState’s resident polling expert, Scott Hounsell to ascertain the validity of the study. To put it simply, it doesn’t look good.

According to Gallup, party affiliation in the United States is 30% Democrat, 40% Independent, and 29% Republican. This means that those who conducted the poll oversampled Democrats by eight points and undersampled Independents by seven points. 

Moreover, when you look at the political affiliation of the respondents who answered the question regarding the victor of the debate, the “Independent” category is not represented. The breakdown includes only shows the following groups: “Lean Democrat,” Lean Republican,” Biden supporter, and “Trump supporter.” 

This means that the researchers grouped Independents into either “lean Democrat” or “lean Republican” without an explanation. The report does not show us how many independents are identified as “lean Democrat” or vice versa. Therefore, these numbers could easily be skewed in Harris’ favor. Given these issues, there seems to be no reason to trust the results of this instant poll put together by a far-left news outlet. 

In the forgotten words of James Earl Jones, “This is CNN.” It is not hard to imagine that they would have juiced the numbers for propaganda purposes. After all, the network has shown time and time again that it is not above using deception to push a political agenda.  

Of course, it’s worth noting that none of this means that a significant number of Americans wouldn’t identify her as the winner — it seems that opinions on the debate might fall along party lines. But the notion that nearly two-thirds of Americans watched that debate and came away thinking that Harris was the clear victor is absurd. The fact that the Democrats and corporate media — but I repeat myself — have been trying to get the nation to focus on “mansplaining” and flying insects even further indicates what most already know: Harris lost the debate decisively. 

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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