Is anyone surprised that one of the most doltish-looking dolts involved in Bloomberg’s Trump focus group is saying she was fooled.
Jessica DeBurro was prominently featured in a video of the focus group posted to Bloomberg Politics’ website that showed 12 Granite State residents fawning over Trump’s everyman appeal and vast wealth. Bloomberg Politics described the focus group participants as “12 Republican and independent voters who are supportive of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy,” while co-managing editor John Heilemann, who led the focus group, further stated that the participants were Trump supporters whose “second choices in the Republican field ran the gamut from Jeb Bush and John Kasich to Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.”
But DeBurro, a data analyst, told TPM Thursday in a phone interview that she is actually a supporter of Carson’s and not Trump’s. She added that while all the participants in the focus group had listed Trump among their top three favored Republican presidential candidates, just one person was “100 percent a Trump supporter.”
We all know there’s a world of difference between being an unsophisticated, easily duped Trump booster, and a thoughtful, judicious supporter of Benjamin Solomon Carson, so shame on Bloomberg.
Whether or not the conclave of dunces interviewed by Bloomberg were all truly, madly, deeply Trump supporters, that piece was clearly edited to show only the classiest pro-Trump comments. It’s still more evidence that the DC press corpse is loving the sweet clicks that only Donald can provide. I’m sure they’d all deny it, but they have to be hitting their knees every night praying to the sweet Lord above for nothing but Trumpmentum for the rest of the year.
schrodinger's cat
Auditions begin next week for Fox’s new show, The American Idiot, also the nominating contest for the Republican nominee for President.
ETA: They should let the audience vote every week and eliminate candidates instead of having primaries. Why should Iowa and NH have all the fun?
dr. bloor
Surprised she’s not a Perry supporter. Those glasses of his are so…brainy and intellectual.
shortstop
Your snark continues to rank among the best here.
boatboy_srq
B. S. Carson? Srsly? BWAHAHAHAHAHA.
BGinCHI
White people are a scary bunch.
Seriously, the psychology behind “I want a rich, white overlord who will say that things are better without doing anything” is so depressing.
America is ripe for mischief of the Godwin kind.
Frankensteinbeck
There is. It’s the difference between telling everyone you meet that you have a black friend, and standing on the street corner screaming at Mexicans to go back where they came from. Okay, the policies aren’t that different, but one of these people desperately wants to pretend they’re not a racist, and the other desperately wants to flaunt it.
Alex S.
Data analyst? More like Dada analyst.
JPL
@BGinCHI: That is what scares me. I’m at the point of thinking Kasich would be the most acceptable. We are in scary times.
samiam
Trump is the reality tv candidate. Frankly, this is pretty much what American voters and non-voters deserves. At least red states who vote in people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Or the non-voters who allow them to win by proxy.
Patrick
I doubt any of his supporters has a clue that a Trump owned company has declared bankruptcy four times.
shortstop
@Frankensteinbeck: That sums it up nicely. And I will note as further evidence that many of Carson’s all-white supporters were previously saying they hoped Allan West would run.
BR
Bloomberg news played a clever trick on everyone here, but they didn’t really lie from what I can tell. The original panel said that the people they interviewed were “supportive” of Trump, not that they were “supporters”. And their definition of “supportive” I think means he was in their top three or something like that.
Chris
@BGinCHI:
I know exactly you mean.
Bobby Thomson
So he’s the anti-Gore.
Patrick
@BGinCHI:
The weird thing is that when the media criticizes Hillary Clinton for being rich, their “concern” is that she is out of touch. But when they talk about Trump as being rich, he is simply being successful. The media’s (and some voter’s) outlandish hypocrisy is reaching new levels.
sukabi
Mistermix, think you missed the significance of the story. Stupid voters = low hanging fruit. Bloomberg News actively, blatantly producing propaganda, proper trump or not, THAT’S the important take away.
BGinCHI
America in 2015 values the wrong things.
Discuss.
BGinCHI
@Patrick: Spot on. Yes. There is no beltway media that does not want the status quo, which means GOP.
Selfish and stupid is a bad combination.
sukabi
Should be pro Trump
Wouldn’t let me edit
Lee
I might have to change barbers until Trump is out of the race. Maybe even for the entire election.
The owner of the shop (who was not cutting my hair) went on & on yesterday about how Trump was just getting a bad rap because he didn’t phrase it PC enough but what he said was essentially true.
shortstop
@Lee: Politics aside, how could someone in the hair business have anything positive to say about Donald Trump? Get out now.
Lee
@shortstop: LOL. Very good point. I had not thought of it like that.
MattF
For the record, here’s WaPo gloating over last week’s NYT Clinton-reporting fiasco.
Chris
@BGinCHI:
Certainly the wrong people.
Patricia Kayden
“one of the most doltish-looking dolts”
That’s so mean but I’m still laughing.
Tripod
I was fooled. His performance is way more entertaining than that stupid TV show, or vapid contest.
mai naem mobile
@shortstop: you’re wrong there. They thought Carson was Allen West. They also thought Tim Scott was Carson who they had already thought was Allen West.
Groucho48
For a blog that has gone All Trump!!! All the Time!!!, criticizing the media for covering Trump to get clicks seems a bit hypocritical.
benw
@Patrick: He’s a R man, she’s a D woman. One’s a maker, and one’s a taker. It’s uppity for the taker to suppose she can beat the maker. Come to think of it, it was awfully uppity of the last taker to beat his maker betters.
cmorenc
This morning, I listened to a few minutes of John Heilemann conducting the Bloomberg Politics focus group of 12 “Trump-supportive” NH voters on the MSNBC channel on my car’s Sirius Satellite radio. Aside from the group-members’ responses themselves, what struck me about Heilemann’s focus-group interview technique was how often his questions were leading in ways that polluted the answers rather than open-ended in character, and how often he seemed unable to avoid tainting his questions with his own ideological leanings.
By contrast, from the focus groups I’ve seen Frank Luntz conduct after some previous Presidential debates, on behalf of one of the major networks – Luntz seems to understand that the informational feedback he gets from these groups is much more useful and valuable (including for the purposes of formulating propaganda), to the extent he can successfully project objective neutrality in his questions, and observe the responses in the manner of an objective social scientist, untainted by his own ideological leanings. True, on some other occasions Luntz has reportedly been hired by his GOP masters to conduct subtly, but deliberately tainted “focus groups” for purposes of producing useful footage for propaganda purposes – but those aren’t really the kind of projects which really put Luntz’s talents to their best and most potent use, which is figuring out what sort of messaging on particular issues or candidates works best with particular sets of voters. In short, part of why Luntz is such an effective spin-master is precisely his ability to objectively set aside his own baggage of ideological bullshit while he’s at work, granted his ultimate purpose is to figure out what kind of bullshit will sell the best and what motivations within people he needs to reach and how in order to sell it.
Luntz is a despicable man, but the times I’ve watched him work focus groups on behalf of a network other than Fox, his skills at uncovering what makes voters tick are undeniable.
shortstop
@mai naem mobile: OMG, you’re so right.
sukabi
@cmorenc: it wasn’t a focus group, it was an excuse to make a propaganda piece supporting Trump.
It should be asked “What is a “news organization” doing producing campaign materials for a presidential candidate?”
cmorenc
@sukabi:
Yes, of course – the first paragraph of my post was about how Heilemann, who conducted this purported “focus group”, ideologically steered the questions and participants answers, undermining the purpose of what a bona fide focus group is about – objectively researching how and why people react to and think about certain things. That’s something the evil genius Frank Luntz seems to understand – you learn far more valuably useful information for generating effective propaganda from conducting a bona fide focus group than the propaganda value of trying to manipulatively steer a purported focus group to get a desired audiovisual – though Luntz will gladly accept big bucks from his right-wing paymasters for a commissioned job doing the latter.
Brandon
I’m sure the beat reporters and business side loves them some Trump, but the Villagers and editorial side clearly detest him. How many have either called for him to quit or said his campaign was over after the McCain thing?