Clinton Leads In Breitbart Poll Conducted As Rebuke To MSM Surveys

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she finishes a speech on the economy after touring Futuramic Tool & Engineering, in Warren, Mich., Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
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Aiming to address a recent slew of “mainstream media” polls showing Hillary Clinton holding a decisive lead over of Donald Trump, Breitbart News conducted its own survey. But the conservative news site came up with similar results.

In a poll out Sunday from Breitbart and Gravis Marketing, Clinton led a four-way contest with 42 percent of the vote to Trump’s 37 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson earned 9 percent of the vote, while the Green Party’s Jill Stein received 3 percent.

Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow explained in a statement accompanying the survey that the site would launch its own series of polls to provide “an accurate assessment” of the 2016 race.

“It’s an open secret that polls are often manipulated and spun to create momentum for a particular candidate or issue,” Marlow said. “Breitbart News Network’s first national poll marks the start of a major initiative to give our readers an accurate assessment on where the American people stand on the key topics and people of the day — without the mainstream media filter.”

As NBC, Bloomberg, Quinnipiac University and Monmouth University have showed Clinton leading in both national and state surveys in recent days, Trump supporters have lobbed charges of “skewed” polls released by a media that favors Clinton. Yet Clinton’s lead in those polls, which ranged between six and twelve points, is not so far from the five-point advantage she held in Breitbart’s survey.

The conservative news site has been criticized for heavily favoring Trump in its coverage, reporting his assertions about President Barack Obama having secret ties to the Islamic State terror group as fact.

Breitbart plans to release more 2016 polls in partnership with Gravis, a Florida-based marketing firm that has a less than stellar record of tracking state congressional races. In the 2014 midterm elections, Gravis published polls that were way off in predicting the results of Senate races in Kentucky and Texas. An “informed ballot” survey conducted by Gravis this spring was mocked for getting a Maryland congressional race wrong by 96 percentage points.

The national Breitbart-Gravis poll was conducted Aug. 9 among 2,832 likely voters. Voters were reached by automated telephone calls, and the margin of error was 1.8 percentage points.

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