Lauretta Brown writes in a Nov. 21 CNSNews.com article:
A poll released Friday by the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) shows that a majority of voters, 64%, support legislation such as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act that would prohibit abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The poll was commissioned by the SBA List and conducted by the polling company, inc./WomanTrend.
What Brown doesn’t report: The Susan B. Anthony List is an anti-abortion group, and the polling company (lowercase is cq) is operated by Kellyanne Conway, manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and works on behalf of right-wing causes. Indeed, Conway’s firm cashed in big during the 2016 campaign even before she joined Trump’s team through her company’s work for the campaigns of both Trump and Ted Cruz.
That ideological bent makes the poll results unreliable since we can assume that the questions were skewed to provide the desired result.
Brown goes on to tout that “The results mirror a Marist poll commissioned by the Knights of Columbus in July.” The Knights of Columbus is a Catholic fraternal organization that reflects Catholic tenets, one of which is opposition to abortion. Marist College, which operates a polling center that the K of C utilized, is a Catholic university; while its polling generally has a good reputation, one cannot discount the possibility of skewing questions to achieve desired results.
Indeed, CNS regularly promotes polls conducted by Marist-K of C since they provide results they like to push on its readers. Most recently, Brown used a Dec. 23 article to tout a Marist-K of C poll finding that “Americans prefer ‘Merry Christmas’ to ‘Happy Holidays’ by 20 percentage points.”