…and there’s voter suppression. A poll taken two days after the first Presidential debate and run by The Wall Street Journal and NBC has Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden opening up a 14-per centage point lead over incumbent President Donald Trump.

However.

Aside from the fact that the poll sampled registered voters, rather than more accurately sampling likely voters, the poll oversampled (Progressive-)Democrat registered voters by eight per centage points (and thereby undersampled Republican registered voters by the same amount), which greatly biased the results.

On the other hand, a Daily Express poll, taken after Trump’s diagnosis with the Wuhan Virus (but which methodology is not described) indicates a different status of the race:

68% said the illness would not affect their vote while 19% said they were “more likely” to support Trump and only 13% “less likely”.

And these poll results:

National Popular Vote

Trump (Republican) = 46%

Biden (Democrat) = 45%

Jorgensen (Libertarian) = 3%

Hawkins (Green) = 1%

Undecided = 5%

And

Battleground States – Popular Vote

Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin

Trump (Republican) = 47%

Biden (Democrat) = 43%

Jorgensen (Libertarian) = 4%

Hawkins (Green) = 1%

Undecided = 5%

Aside from having Trump in the lead in this poll, the other takeaway suggests that, despite low Libertarian support (in 2016, there was somewhat stronger Green support), a third party candidate could seriously affect the election’s outcome.

Which raises the question: is such evident bias in the WSJ/NBC poll an attempt to discourage Republican and Conservative voters from voting? It’s hard to believe these two news outlets could run such an incompetently done poll. In truth, though, they’re not alone. News outlets typically run such oversampled/undersampled polls.

Which makes the bias widespread, and the suppression, to coin a term, systemic.