Billy & Barbie realize #HillaryClinton's shrinking lead is #Trump'ed up!

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By some sort of error within Blogger, this strip did not post when it should have.  It sat in my queue as a draft for some reason.  Regardless, I am glad it did since it ultimately relied on data that was utterly, completely incomplete and misleading.  If anyone should suffer for what happened on November 8, 2016, it's the polling industry.  They pretended their numbers were somehow accurate and indicative of how Americans would vote and yet it went the other way.

Read on if you want to read my original commentary for this strip.  It's still accurate, but the poll numbers I reference, obviously, weren't.

-thepete 11/11/16

Check out the graph Billy is looking at here: http://election.princeton.edu/history-of-meta-analysis/ (see the PNG file here: http://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/autographics/MM_history-unlabeled.png)

What if I told you that the media was making up drama out of whole cloth by ignoring easily accessible reality?
Sure, the media has been full of crap for years but it's gotten pretty blatant and incredibly harmful to America.

Imagine you turned on the news and saw a news anchor reporting on "the black sky menace".  As an intelligent person, you'd be concerned at first until you realize that it was night time.  Only the news is not reporting that part of the story.  They're also not reporting that there is nothing wrong with a black sky, so long as it is night.

This has been the media for the last year.  They focus on a few national polls, instead of local state polls, so they can create alarm and concern in their viewers.  Meanwhile, election.princeton.edu uses the average of those local state polls to work out that Hillary Clinton is safely ahead.  Sam Wang (pronounced "Wong"), the man behind that website, is confident in his conclusion that Trump can't win.  He also has a graph (the graph Billy mentions in the comic above) on his site that more or less proves that if the election had been held on any day in the past six months, Clinton would have won.

So where does all this election drama in the mainstream news come from?  Their butts, clearly.

Now, I don't know if this is the media willfully ignoring the facts or just being too lazy to do their jobs, but the effect on America is the same--panic and anxiety in the minds of the American people (and people around the world).  It's the job of the news media to be an independent 4th branch of government that informs We, The People, of the facts that we need to know to make the best decisions in our lives--like who to vote into political office.  When these Fear-Monger Games are played, people get scared and polarized.  The country is divided and people begin to believe there is a life and death struggle going on for the soul of our country and maybe the Earth.

The reality is that there isn't.  America is polling for Hillary Clinton.  Haa been for months.  Now think about how many times you've seen a panic-inducing headline that made you think Trump might win.  Yeah, it's been feeling pretty dark a LOT over the last 6 months.

Don't worry--it's only night time.  The sun will rise just fine the morning of November 9, 2016 and America will be fine.

Well, assuming we all vote.  Speaking of which, if you've got any questions on how to actually cast your ballot, check out vote411.org.  They seem to be a good resource.

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