Polling

At the conclusion of a story on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News on the drop in gas prices and how Americans feel about the economy, CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason felt that it was important to inform viewers that President Obama’s approval rating has improved six points from October in the latest CBS News poll. “All this has also helped lift President Obama's job approval…

Appearing on Wednesday's NBC Today, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd spun former Florida Governor Jeb Bush announcing that he was "exploring" the possibility of running for president in 2016 as a boost for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton: "By the way, the big Jeb Bush announcement helps Hillary because it'll scare Democrats and rally them around Hillary even more."

On her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Tuesday, host Andrea Mitchell could barely conceal her disgust while reporting on a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showing a majority of Americans supported the enhanced interrogation tactics used by the CIA after September 11th: "51% said that the procedures used, the interrogation enhanced tactics, which have been defined as torture, 51% said that…

On Monday's CBS This Morning, co-host Gayle King claimed that Americans were "divided" over the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques after September 11th. However, the latest CBS News poll she cited "shows that 49% of Americans feel aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding are sometimes justified. 36% say they are never justified." The remaining 14% said that it "depends"…

The delusion is strong with this one. On Friday's Morning Joe program on what remains of MSNBC, Al Sharpton, completely ignoring how late appearances in Maryland and Illinois by President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle coincided with significant deterioration in the situations of Democratic Party gubernatorial candidates in Maryland and Illinois, blamed Bill and Hillary Clinton, and not the…

Wednesday afternoon, supposed polling genius Nate Silver tweeted that "Turnout was down from 2010 in almost every state." Silver's readers and clients had better hope that Silver is usually better at counting — and analysis (HT Twitchy):

The New York Times greeted the GOP takeover of the Senate with a mix of honest and sour reporting, emphasizing "angry" voters while downplaying the ideological significance of an "expensive" campaign "stumbling" to a close, while insisting that the Democrats succeeded in hanging on to their voting base and warning Republicans "about reading too much into their victories."

While all three network morning shows on Monday covered the upcoming midterm election, only ABC's Good Morning America mentioned the real possibility of Republicans taking control of the Senate. Co-host George Stephanopoulos informed viewers: "And Republicans seem to be closing in on the six Senate seats they need to gain a majority....The forecaster Nate Silver, from FiveThirtyEight, puts their…

M.D. Kittle at Watchdog.org's Wisconsin Reporter scooped everyone covering the Badger State Governor's race on Tuesday when he reported that Democratic candidate Mary Burke's resumé is not what her campaign's web site says it is. Burke's campaign bio claims that she "played a central role in Trek’s expansion as the Director of European Operations." Kittle found "multiple former Trek executives"…

The most recent CNN/Opinion Research poll covering October 24-26 shows that 68 percent of those surveyed said that they are "very angry ... or somewhat angry ... about the way things are going in the country today," and that 60 percent are "very scared" or "somewhat scared." CNN's web coverage and the poll report presented on Jake Tapper's show today relayed that info. But, predictably, the poll…

At their debate Tuesday night, former Florida governor (2007-2010), former Republican (1974-2010), former independent (2010-2012) and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist got out the crying towel over why the Sunshine State's economy was so bad on his watch. He also refused to acknowledge that incumbent Republican Governor Rick Scott deserves any credit for the state economy's…

In relaying the results of their polling partnership's latest survey, Associated Press polling director Jennifer Agiesta and reporter Emily Swanson held their most important finding until their report's seventh paragraph. Despite their effort to downplay it, Matt Drudge, whose nose for genuine news is legendary, spotted it. Accordingly, his current headline screams: "POLL SHOCK: WOMEN WANT…

Elizabeth Williamson's coverage at the Wall Street Journal of the latest WSJ/NBC News poll has a very strange omission. It contains a graph showing "right track/wrong track" polling percentages heading each midterm election going back to 1990. But Williamson, while addressing why the American people feel as they do right now in larger historical context, never commented on the graph's specific…

Appearing on Friday's CBS This Morning, Republican pollster Frank Luntz reacted to the latest CBS News poll showing Americans having a "crisis of confidence" in government institutions: "The problem is that the institutions that have the greatest impact on us, the CDC, the FDA, the EPA, those that are responsible for our health and safety, are the ones that have had the biggest collapse. In fact…