At National Review, Dan McLaughlin, formerly of RedState.com, gloats over a recent poll by Reuters/Ipsos purporting to show Hillary Clinton well ahead of Donald Trump:

But today's tracker shows Trump deep in the dumps, down 46.0 to 34.8, a deficit of more than 11 points (albeit with an improbable 19.2% undecided). This on the heels of falling behind in the latest Fox News and Rasmussen polls.

One could write columns rebutting this nonsense every day, but – yet again – if you want to be the "benchmark [vehicle] for reaching those Republicans/conservatives who lead and shape opinion on all the important issues," then a higher standard of critical analysis is required.

The polling data this cycle is hopelessly contaminated when it comes to the Trump vs. Clinton match-up, and not in Trump's favor.  Whether you think Trump is the best candidate to represent the GOP or not, it behooves real conservatives not to support and promote the liberal polling bias against the GOP nominee.  If you do it this cycle, come a future cycle, when your preferred nominee is in the game, you won't have a moral leg to stand on for criticizing.  Useful idiocy is horrible karma.

With regard to the Reuters/Ipsos poll in question, you can drill into the detailed polling data.  Of the 1,276 respondents, 628 (49.2%) were Democrats, just 498 (39.0%) were Republicans, and 112 (8.8%) were independents, and the remaining 38 (3.0%) were members of another party.

A 10.2% margin of Democrats over Republicans?  And anyone seriously thinks this poll is representative of the American public's true voting intentions?

Ridiculous.

Gallup has reliable long-term historical data on party affiliations, and as of the latest data in late May, the split is 28% to 27% for Democrats over Republicans. That would be a 1% advantage to the Democrats, not 10.2% as the Reuters/Ipsos poll has in its makeup.

If we rebalance this poll to align with the actual composition of the voting public, Clinton's lead magically disappears, and we are left with a statistical tie.

We'll also deal with that flawed Fox News poll referred to by NRO.  It shows Clinton ahead of Trump 42% to 39% in the direct match-up, or also up by 39% to 36% when Gary Johnson is thrown in.  And then we look behind the curtain for the answer to the following question: "When you think about politics, do you think of yourself as a Democrat or a Republican?"

The Fox News poll split is a 6% advantage to the Democrats, 41% to 35%, over the Republican respondents, as compared to an even split in the previous polls by this outlet.  Take that bias away, and we have at least a statistical tie, or, more likely, a slight Trump lead.

Watching the race play out, it is rather disgusting to see the clearly problematic polling data being repeatedly trotted out and then uncritically regurgitated in both the mainstream and even conservative media.

But that fact is why Trump became the nominee.  The vast majority of the right-of-center public no longer trusts the mainstream media and its apparatus, which includes the polling firms they – along with the political establishment – help support.

This trend is evident in the latest rankings of U.S. media publishers.  Breitbart now has as many combined page views as the Wall Street Journal each month, and sites like American Thinker are in the same page view category as media establishment barons such as Fox Business, Newsweek, The Financial Times, and The Economist.

The times, they are a changin', and the conservative media landscape will never be the same again. Old-school sites like NRO and the Weekly Standard have lost control of the narrative, and the genie ain't ever going back in that bottle.  The conservative civil war is on, and we ain't ever getting back together – at least not without near full capitulation by those who led the conservative movement down the wrong path for a quarter-century.