Daily Kos Releases Dubious Poll To Undermine Support For Rand Paul

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, May 28, 2010

In a blatant effort to counter the recent independent Rasmussen poll which found that, despite a contrived corporate media smear campaign, Rand Paul was beating his Democratic opponent Jack Conway by a whopping 25 points, establishment liberal outfit The Daily Kos has released a dubious poll that claims Paul is only leading by three points.

A survey conducted on May 19 by the politically non-partisan Rasmussen polling agency found that Paul held a gargantuan 25 point lead over Democrat Jack Conway amongst likely voters in Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race.

The Daily Kos commissioned Research 2000, a group they have worked with before, to conduct a poll which was released yesterday. The results of the survey claim that Paul’s lead over Conway has shrunk to just 3 points in the aftermath of the corporate media smear campaign against him.

Daily Kos is a neo-liberal website run by an establishment apologist who routinely attacks independent politicians who are not part of the two party system. Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas even attacked darling of the left Dennis Kucinich when he refused to tow the party line on government run health care by pointing out that the Obamacare bill was written by the insurance companies.

Former Central Intelligence Agency trainee Moulitsas, who once described the CIA as a “very liberal institution,” accused Kucinich of being responsible for the deaths of 44,000 Americans.

“Lucky for him, railing against the Civil Rights Act plays to his base,” writes Moulitsas in an accompanying article to the poll, pointing out that Rand Paul’s support amongst Republicans had risen since the controversy. This comment alone betrays the inherent bias of The Daily Kos and is a red flag that the poll is completely untrustworthy in comparison to the Rasmussen survey.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Rand Paul never ‘railed against the Civil Rights Act’ – it wasn’t even part of his platform. He responded to an underhanded smear attempt to characterize him as a racist by advancing a philosophical and nuanced position on one of the ten titles of the Civil Rights Act, a view shared by mainstream libertarian icons like Harry Browne as well as prominent professors – that hardly qualifies as “railing against the Civil Rights Act” now does it?

Indeed, Paul has been trying to get back to the core principles of his message – implementing sound money policies to remedy the economic crisis and scaling back big government, while chastising the corporate media for obsessing about their contrived effort at race-baiting.

The attack dog establishment media went into overdrive in the days following the Rachel Maddow interview, using a clearly dishonest and fraudulent transcript put out by MSNBC which mischaracterized Paul’s response and made it appear is if he supported businesses not serving black people and wanted to repeal the entire Civil Rights Act, something we he explicitly never said.

The framing of the questions in the Daily Kos poll also reveal inherent bias. “Would you be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports and will work to improve the new health care reform law, or a candidate who will work to repeal it completely?” asks one question. Note the none too subtle implication that the candidate who supports health care reform is by default working to improve things, and in doing so taking positive action, whereas no reason or justification is suggested for the candidate who wants to repeal health care – implying that this has no benefits and is negative. Rand Paul is the candidate who wants to repeal Obamacare. This is a classic example of a loaded question and places the integrity of the whole survey under suspicion.

Critics have highlighted doubts about Research 2000’s polling methods in conducting surveys for the Daily Kos in the past. Indeed, while Rasmussen has been proven to have the least “house effect” on polls, aside from Zogby, Daily Kos/Research2000 has the second highest “house effect” out of all the polling agencies. “House effect” means how you ask the question affects the survey result, in other words, DailyKos/Research 2000 have the most biased and untrustworthy polls, whereas Rasmussen’s work is far more credible.

Earlier this year, Daily Kos/Research 2000 put out a poll which attempted to portray conservatives as crazy right-wingers who embrace dangerous ideas. Of course, the fact that CIA cheerleader and Kos founder Moulitsas was preparing material for a book about crazy right-wingers who embrace dangerous ideas had nothing to do with the impartiality of the poll results, we can be sure.

Given Moulitsas’ brazen agenda to smear any anti-establishment political figure as crazy, racist, or unelectable, it’s not surprising that the poll he commissioned produced wildly different results to the Rasmussen survey that took place just a week earlier. And even then, despite the ceaseless smear campaign, and despite the dubious Daily Kos poll – Rand Paul is still defeating his Democratic opponent.

Moulitsas is trying to undermine support for Rand Paul amongst the electorate who consider themselves to be Independents by creating a contrived consensus. But just as the pathetic “country club” smear faded away, the Civil Rights sideshow will melt into the background and voters will once again get to hear about what Rand Paul really stands for – taking on big government, enforcing the Constitution, and fixing the economic catastrophe that the establishment has dumped upon Americans from all colors and backgrounds.

This article was posted: Friday, May 28, 2010 at 7:45 am

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