The eight week-long campaign leading up to Australia’s federal election was horrific, but spare a thought for our m8s in the St8s: the grind through party nominations has only just finished, at the actual general election is only coming in November.
What we’re getting at is the cottage industry of pollsters, pundits and analysts employed to make sense of the current American political landscape is starting to lose it.
They’ve had the dubious task of tracking Bernie Sanders‘ dark horse run, the furor surrounding Hillary Clinton, and the unstoppable, specious babbling of Donald Trump. Can. You. Even. Imagine.
Statisticians need to chill out sometimes too, so the folks at Public Policy Polling have done what they can; nay, what they must.
They’ve asked the American public what they think of “independent” candidate Harambe. The gorilla that died.
In a newly-released stack of results, we now know how that blessed primate stacks up in net favourability. Stunningly, despite his gentle gorilla heart, our Cincinatti Zoo companion doesn’t rate too highly among the masses.
Things look somewhat better for the damned jungle king against Clinton and Trump, with Harambe hypothetically securing a non-zero percentage of the vote.
Applying that percentage across the American population means if they all voted, he’d land over 16 million votes. Not bad for an ape in Hell.
Interestingly, Republicans are far less likely to favour him than Democrats or independents. That being said, the party is seemingly in the process of disemboweling itself on a grand scale, so maybe they’ve been too focused on their own self-destruction to pay attention to ‘Be.
FWIW, the poll also puts Clinton ahead of Trump in most metrics, but then again… PPP also asked respondents whether they thought she had solid ties to Beelzebub himself.
They should have skipped the middleman, and just asked Harambe himself. For obvious reasons.
