New Poll Indicates Turning Point for Johnson Campaign and the Nation

A new poll just released by Bindlesnitch reveals hidden strengths in Gary Johnson’s Libertarian party presidential campaign bid, according to data published today on the polling organization’s website.

According to a press release from the company founder, a 67 year-old self-confessed former Libertarian who now considers himself a socialist, the new poll shows Johnson, a former Republican two-term governor of New Mexico, and running mate William Weld, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, winning  27 states outright if the election were to be held today, with landslide victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College results.

“These aren’t the results we expected when we conducted the poll and we are frankly shocked because, as socialists, we obviously would have preferred to see Green party candidate Jill Stein coming out on top, but the results are what they are.  It appears that Johnson’s hidden strengths are only now becoming obvious in an electorate that is frankly fed up with both of the major political parties and want to send a message to mainstream politicians – and the  media – that enough is too much.”

“Our findings are so shocking to us that we felt it was important to let the country know that there is going to be a sudden tectonic shift in our system of government because, when they win, Johnson and Weld will be coming into office along with a completely new Congress.  Our polling results indicate that incumbent congressmen of both parties are going to be swept out of office in November. Where there are Libertarian party candidates running, they will win. Where there aren’t any Libertarian congressional candidates, the electorate will turn the incumbent out of office in favor of the challenger from the other party.”

In the Senate, the bloodletting will be mitigated by the fact that only 34 Senate seats are up for re-election this year, but it is a very different story in the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats are up for grabs. BindleSnitch thinks that there will be much less turnover in the House than there will be in the Senate, but still expects at least a 24 percent turnover, reflecting the number of Senate seats they expect the Libertarians to win in November. “We’re very strong on the presidential race and we think our numbers are  good for the Senate races, but we just don’t have the resources yet to handicap all  those House seats,” rued a BindleSnitch spokesperson.

If Bindlesnitch is right, their results predict chaos for the federal government as a new and inexperienced administration takes office along with a Congress that will be upside down, with neither major party having a majority in either house. In fact, it is possible that, for the first time in American congressional history, there won’t be a single party in control of either house of congress. Instead, the Libertarian party will have to form a coalition with either Democratic or Republican candidates in order to rule at all.

In the American system of representative democracy, control of the congress is vested in the party with the most members in each house, who have the authority to assign Senators and Congressmen to the various committee chairmanships, but committee chairmanships have always been determined on the basis of seniority within the party, with the exception of the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate, both of which are determined by a vote by the majority party.  Without a majority party in power, no one is quite sure how the Congressional system will operate going forward.

The founders of Bindlesnitch are very confident in the accuracy of their system, which contradicts the trends being reported by other major polling organizations, because it is based on anonymous polling data collected via the Internet by the two-year old company headquartered in Florida, with branches in Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, California, and Colorado.

They claim to have developed a new polling paradigm that bases its results on a series of true-false questions, but what makes their poll different from every other poll is that the people who are participating in the poll don’t even know that they are being polled about their presidential choices because they aren’t asked  any questions about the candidates themselves, or their campaign platforms.

Instead, the new polling strategy uses a list of one hundred “true or false” preference questions  in which the poll taker indicates a yes or no answer to questions such as, “Do you prefer whole milk or skim milk?”

Other questions rank preferences for favorite shopping destinations, automobile brands, sports teams, movies, restaurant chains and other likes and dislikes but never mention any of the candidates by name, nor do they directly ask any questions about any of the more than 100 public policy questions that are addressed by the campaign platforms of the various parties.

Instead, the answers to the true or false questions are correlated against the answers gleaned from focus groups of strong, moderate and luke-warm voters for each of the four major political parties and their candidates, including the Democratic, Republican, Green and Libertarian parties…but the participants in the focus groups don’t know that they are being polled about their political preferences either. Instead, they also think they are being polled on their preferences in the other categories, but their surveys include questions that will indicate their political preferences.

By correlating the answers given in the anonymous polling with the answers given by the focus group members, Bindlesnitch is able to compile results in what is in effect a “double-blind” survey system in which the people being polled don’t know that they are being polled about their political preferences and the people polling them don’t know any of their background information.

Bindlesnitch spent two years collecting data from the focus groups and developing the software needed to correlate those answers with the ones given in the anonymous online polling.  Expert in statistics are astounded by the company’s methodology because they appear to have solved one of the most difficult problems in political polling:  how do you screen out the personal preferences of the poll takers themselves.

“This way,” explained company co-founder Alan Milner, “we don’t know anything about the people we are polling other than what the polls themselves reveal but our system allows us to gauge education, income, occupation, race, religion, sexual orientation and, obviously, political orientation down to a level of granularity that has never been achieved before.”

“For example, we can tell you on which day of the week a given respondent will eat at McDonald’s and which day of the week that respondent will eat at Burger King. No, seriously, the system is that sophisticated, and it is only possible because we have access to computers that a few years ago would have been considered super computers but are available today for under a million dollars each.”

“Also, the speed of the system is amazing. Because we are constantly getting more data from our website as people log on and express their preferences, we can see changes much more quickly than other polling organizations can.”

The system was developed by Milner, a 67 year-old retired mortgage broker, and  Robert Pannier,  a 48 year-old computer programmer and part-time minister who works in the Minnesota prison system as a lay preacher.  Pannier also runs another website, called The Minor League Sports Report, which is popular among gamblers who bet on minor league games

Milner explains Johnson’s hidden popularity as a flaw in the usual polling process.

“Polls are generally conducted by telephone, which is hit or miss. Some polls call the same people over and over again in an attempt to gauge changes over time, but they never get the same sample twice because increasingly people don’t answer their cell phones when they get calls from numbers they don’t recognize. This means that more and more poll takers are calling land lines only because they get better results from land lines, but that means they are talking to older, technology averse voters who will obviously favor one of the two mainstream parties. Younger people – people who are more likely to vote for minor party candidates – don’t have land lines anymore.”

“Another problem with land lines is that they are not owner specific. Any number of people – anyone in that home – is liable to answer the phone, but anonymous polling systems aren’t set up for that discrepancy. Of course that isn’t really anonymous polling, is it?”

The result, Milner maintains, is that established polling organizations’ results are skewed toward Democratic or Republican candidates. “That’s like arguing over whether Tuesday is a better day than Thursday. It has become almost impossible to differentiate between Republicans and Democrats  on the basis of policy questions. Their policies are virtually identical, which means that voters are choosing between them on the basis of personality, not politics. They just think they are voting the issues when they are really voting the people.”

According to their polling results, most people would really rather have dinner with Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump, in many cases because they are certain that Trump would stick them with the bill, but they would rather talk politics with Gary Johnson than with any of the other three candidates.

What about Jill Stein?

“Stein is a non-starter. It is amazing how many people don’t like her, considering how few people know anything about her. We think it may have something to do with the fact that she was recently campaigning from Moscow….literally from Moscow.”

While most of their methods are proprietary, the founders of BindleSnitch were willing to tell us that their findings are based on more than 10,000 focus group interviews and that they have now logged more than a quarter of a million poll takers on their website. They claim a reliability of plus or minus one percent.

“Those numbers are much, much higher than any other polling organization has ever aspired to and, based on that, you can take it to the bank. Gary Johnson is going to be the next president of the United States.”

DISCLAIMER:  THIS IS OF COURSE A SATIRE. NO SUCH POLLS EXIST, ALTHOUGH PERHAPS THEY SHOULD.  THE POLLING ORGANIZATION IS COMPLETELY BOGUS, ALTHOUGH TELLUS NEWS DIGEST IS OBVIOUSLY A REAL THING. WE JUST WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW EASY IT WOULD BE TO FABRICATE A COMPLETELY FICTITIOUS POLL AND DISSEMINATE IT THROUGH THE INTERNET, BUT WE DIDN’T WANT PEOPLE THINKING THAT ANY OF THIS DATA WAS REAL.  THE QUESTION IS HOW LONG DID IT  TAKE YOU BEFORE YOU BEGAN TO SUSPECT THAT SOMETHING WAS AMISS?