Jim Hoft, the man behind the right wing Gateway Pundit blog, is such a legend of blogging dumbassery that multiple observers have dubbed him “the stupidest man on the internet.” Today, Hoft is touting a pretty new chart which purports to show Donald Trump enjoys rising support among Latinos, but it turns out the data isn’t from a scientific survey.

In fact, Hoft’s graphic is nothing more than a publicity stunt for a Manhattan marketing firm. The rest of his delusional screed is just breathless extrapolation from the flawed premise, feeding his fantasy that black and Latino voters will desert the Democratic Party to vote for a plainspoken racist like Trump.

‘Garbage in, garbage out,’ as they say, and Hoft is full of garbage. What you see below is not a scientific opinion poll at all. It is a product of ‘data mining’ by a company called XL Alliance. According to their Tumblr, the chart was created with the CulturIntel™ system,

a proprietary methodology that uses an arsenal of tools such as key word Boolean, topical text analytics and artificial intelligence to draw actionable insights and map motivational, behavioral and cultural nuances.

The data comes from unbiased and unfiltered digital and social conversations (across platforms that range from Facebook to forums and even review and special interest sites) that are mined and mapped across ethnic groups, generations or key stages of decision making.

Note that there has been no random sampling involved here, and no weighting of samples, and no margin of error is provided, so these results have nothing to do with the opinions of likely voters. Instead, they are the product of an algorithm that shoots through the internet to measure controversy.

While data mining has many useful applications, no political scientist would call this a reliable measure of public opinion, much less a reliable predictor of electoral outcomes:

http://culturintel.tumblr.com/post/145513494088/big-data-reports-latino-support-for-trump-on-the

For one thing, these measures are a complete outlier from real polls taken very recently. Clinton beat Trump by 39 points in a Fox News Latino poll less than three weeks ago — a fact which is all the more telling because Hoft got this ‘news’ from a promotional article published yesterday at the Fox News Latino website.

The author? XL Alliance co-founder and president Lili Gil Valletta, of course. Because it’s too much to ask that a real polling expert examine the company’s conclusions before they post their warped results on a Tumblr and invite ideologically-driven nitwits like Hoft to give them free publicity.

ADDING: Trump’s grabby campaign manager is tweeting about the new “poll.”

One thought on “Stupidest Man On The Internet Falls For Fake Opinion Poll”
  1. The hed on that pretty chart is:

    Clinton Vs. Trump Candidate Opinion/ Affinity

    From the fine print found beneath the pretty chart in question:

    Source: 9.734,384 sourced from 30% message boards, 27% topical sites, 22% social networks, 12% blogs, 9% comments.

    In other words, “the CulturIntel team” took meaningless data, ran it through their “proprietary insights methodology” and crowed when it generated … nothing of any possible use to anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.

    The take-home lesson here isn’t that Jim Hoft is as dumb as a bag of hammers—we’ve all known that for a very long time—it’s that XL Alliance should not be trusted with real data on any topic of consequence.

    –alopecia

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