Politics is now a 24/7, 365 activity. As soon as one election is over, the arrows start being slung for the next one.

The 2016 Republican primaries with their endless debates and 

16 hapless contenders rolled through Fox, CNN, and MSNBC like a slow-moving freight train from 2015 through the spring of 2016 when the most unlikely of the candidates – Donald J. Trump – walked all over some of the biggest names in American politics.

https://potus2016.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Trump-republican-debate-election-2016.jpg

I don’t know if anyone other than Trump and his immediate family thought he had a snowball’s chance when he first announced. (Though I have one good friend who was a Trump supporter from day one. Good eyeballs, John).

Despite the drip, drip, drip of the email scandal (which remains unresolved to this day) and the lack of answers about Benghazi, the Democrats were simply biding their time until they could coronate Hillary. I mean she was a brand, had more money, a bigger organization, more political experience than The Donald.

How could she possibly lose to a real estate developer with no political experience and so much hair. And she dominated the polls.

Ah, yes, the polls. Those surveys of likely voters.

It has never been truer – except during the administrations of Andrew Jackson and his successful battle to kill the Second Bank of the United States – that politics is blood sport. And it is polls / surveys that keep track of the score. 

The attempted assassination of President Andrew Jackson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lawrence_(failed_assassin)

So how did the pollsters get it so wrong in the 2016 election? All but one major polling firm called it for Hillary right down the line.

The major reason that virtually all of the pollsters except Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, the owner of a polling company herself, got it wrong was, they were asking questions that respondents could answer untruthfully. 

Listen to Kellyanne tell the story when interviewed during the campaign. 

 “It’s because it’s become socially desirable, if you’re a college-educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump.” 

The recently appointed campaign manager said that the ‘hidden Trump vote’ is ‘very significant.’ 

“Have you been able to put a number on that?” the interviewer asked. 

“Yes,” Conway replied. 

“What do you think that is?” the interviewer pressed. 

“I can’t discuss it,” she said. “It’s a project we’re doing internally. I call it the undercover Trump voter, but it’s real.” 

Trump has trailed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, in nearly every poll for the past several weeks.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-manager-polls-wrong-kellyanne-conway-2016-8/

Have the pollsters learned anything now that the Democratic primary race is underway? As I write this the numbers look like this at Real Clear Politics.

RCP POLL AVERAGE

2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination

– https://www.realclearpolitics.com https://www.realclearpolitics.co https://www.realclearpolitics.com

If you have been following this circus, you know that the only major shift has been that Biden’s numbers took a hit and Harris’ took a jump as a result of her attacking the former Vice President during the first debate.

Senator Harris’ operating basis, whether in this race or interviewing someone in a Senate hearing, is to engage in rather vicious verbal attacks. Given that her attack of Vice President Biden during the first debate drove her poll numbers up several points, one can expect to see more of this from the junior senator from California.

As a result, she jumped into a strong third (behind Biden and Sanders) which is a little bit scary as this is one angry lady.

But one has to question these numbers. Tulsi Gabbard, the surfing National Guard Major from Hawaii who served two tours in the Middle East (Iraq and Kuwait) was often acknowledged as having won the first Democratic debate, shows only a 1.4 percent rating in the Real Clear Politics poll above.

Regardless of her performance in the Democratic primary, Gabbard, showing remarkable poise and real foreign policy brilliance in the debate, is a politician to watch. Congress is not blessed with many of her intelligence.

The blog Crooks and Liars’ small sampling revealed:

Thank you for voting! 

Tulsi Gabbard 39.53% (3,785 votes)

Elizabeth Warren 34.01% (3,256 votes)

Julián Castro 9.13% (874 votes)

John Delaney 6.02% (576 votes)

Cory Booker 3.35% (321 votes)

Beto O’Rourke 2.03% (194 votes)

Amy Klobuchar 1.98% (190 votes)

Bill de Blasio 1.67% (160 votes)

Jay Inslee 1.4% (134 votes)

Tim Ryan 0.88% (85 votes)

https://crooksandliars.com/2019/06/who-won-first-democratic-primary-debate

Don’t dismiss the importance of writing survey questions correctly. There is a technology to it. Done incorrectly, it gives the industry a bad name.

I heard from a person who’d had a survey done regarding a new product he was selling. The survey results led him to believe, the product would fly off his shelves. The opposite occurred. Survey questions must be worded properly.

Surveys done correctly can open the door to marketing magic. But you have to ask the right questions to find the channel to real prospect desire.

In the course of Bruce learning about our business and explaining his company’s services, I was utterly amazed when he came up with what has turned out to be the perfect brand positioning statement for our company!  He freely offered this valuable data as a suggestion to correctly align our brand positioning until we could do full surveys to identify and most properly position ourselves in the marketplace.  One could easily pay thousands of dollars for this advice!

Thank you, Bruce – you truly demonstrate by your actions the desire to best serve and really care for your clients – a rarity in today’s world!

TK

Marketing based on properly done surveys drives sales and income.

Give us a call if we can be of service.

Very Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman

President & CEO

On Target Research

www.ontargetresearch.com

818-397-1401

/crooksandliars.com/2019/06/who-won-first-democratic-primary-debate https://crooksandliars.com/2019/06/who-won-first-democratic-primary-debate

In the early nineteenth century, from about 1820s to 1846s, immense Mexican land grants of tens of thousands of acres dominated the California landscape. The grants covered the soft rolling hills along the coast and inland and became grazing lands for cattle on a thousand hills in the halcyon days of Mexican California.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Massachusetts had become the recognized capital of American shoe manufacturing and the booming new industry needed leather, lots of it.

That need created a whole new paradigm: sleek, three-masted clipper ships loaded with provisions such as iron cooking pots, farm tools, musical instruments, gunpowder, coffee and tea, spices, cocoa, sugar and molasses, silks and lace sailed from Boston and made the torturous 17,000 mile, 6 month journey to California. (Makes one think twice about complaining about the economy seats in the 5-hour flight across the country).