Election 2016 and the rampant abuse of data

Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton in Texas, in a two-way poll conducted by the Washington Post over the past month.

This result is indispensible to those following the 2016 election — as a reminder of how easy it is to misuse data.

Seven percent of Texans want a border wall to protect them from Oklahoma, one poll told us. "Nearly 20 percent of Trump's supporters say freeing the slaves was a bad idea," Yahoo News reported. A dead gorilla from Ohio would finish ahead of Green Party candidate Jill Stein in a five-way race. And Scott Walker, during his presidential race, was 2.1 times as untruthful as Florentine doll-turned-boy Pinocchio. Or something.

The political media have hurled this "data" at readers trying to follow the 2016 elections. All of this data is useless at best and dishonest and misleading at worst. There are boatloads of useful and enlightening data available this election, more than in any previous presidential cycle. But data is very easy to abuse and misuse. Our pollsters and our media have spent plenty of time and column inches this year engaged in this sort of inhumane torture.

Among those making readers dumber are the pollsters, first among them the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. PPP this week retweeted a comment mocking Green Party nominee Jill Stein as "polling worse than Harambe." PPP you see, has repeatedly asked voters if they would vote for the Texas-born Western lowland gorilla who was killed in May at the Cincinnati zoo. The pollster's occasion for mocking Stein: A Stein tweet arguing that she should be in the national debates this fall, and in which Stein wrote, "I do not take polls seriously."