The purported results of a Monmouth University survey make no sense whatsoever, which is illuminating…about why we should pay no attention to polls.  This one was supposed to show the impact of the endless January 6 Commission hearings. Apparently they have had no impact at all. 38% of adults said they believe Trump was directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot compared to 42% who said the same in June before the hearings began. Well, anyone who believed President Trump was directly responsible for the riot is a) an idiot b) not interested in facts or evidence or c) so biased and determined to believe all anti-Trump media spin that they probably didn’t watch the hearings anyway.

That, of course, is what is so absurd about the poll. It didn’t isolate respondents who watched the hearings or paid attention to them from those who did not. This feature appeals to elude the news media. For example, the Washington Examiner writes, “Another 32% said they don’t believe Trump did anything wrong after viewing the hearings, compared to 30% the month before.” Wrong. All the poll shows are the numbers in June and in August after the prime time hearings were shown.  The numbers don’t reflect what respondents who watched the hearings thought before and after them.

And as with the “directly responsible” group, believing that Trump “did nothing wrong” is evidence of ignorance, unshakeable bias, ethical inertness or brain damage. Of course he did something wrong. He made unsubstantiated claims that he won the election. He deliberately refused to act in the best interests of the nation and follow the Constitution after his clumsy and incompetent efforts to challenge the votes in key stated. He stirred up a group of extreme MAGA wackos—he had to know just by looking at them—and sent them off to demonstrate at the Capitol. It was irresponsible. It was reckless. It was childish. It was unpresidential. That adds up to wrong, and nobody should need Pelosi’s rigged witch trial to figure that out.

Then we have the 35% who say running around the Capitol wearing funny hats, breaking through doors and spraying Capitol police with bear spray and generally trashing the place is “a legitimate protest,” up one point from June, two from a year ago. Morons. Do you think they watched the Star Chamber, single party hearings? They were too busy watching cartoons. For Monmouth to suggest any nexus with the hearings is forcing a round peg into a square hole.

In addition to all this, Monmouth can’t be trusted anyway. “The sensational revelations during the hearings do not seem to have moved the public opinion needle on Trump’s culpability for either the riot or his spurious election fraud claims,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “This continues to give political cover to Republican leaders who avoid addressing the damage done to our democratic processes that day.”

Well we know where Patrick stands, don’t we! If the poll takers aren’t objective, the poll results aren’t trustworthy. Since the organization running the poll had made up its mind that the hearings were boffo proof of as “insurrection,” those results are likely skewed. That would mean that the percentage of the public that now recognizes the insurrection narrative as false Trump Derangement propaganda designed to keep him out of the ’24 race by any means possible is considerably higher than Monmouth’s biased poll suggests.

Seriously, Pat, what “sensational revelations”? One of the usual mainstream media hacks cited Cassidy Huchinson’s now thoroughly discredited testimony as its example of that, neatly ignoring the subsequent revelations that she full of what Joe Biden would call “malarkey.” And what was the “damage done to our democratic processes that day”? Show me the damage. The damage was done by both parties allowing voting procedures that encouraged skepticism and distrust, as well as manipulation.

Good poll, Monmouth! Well done! And Pat, you earned a visit from Sidney Wang: