Check it out, padewan. I'ma show you how to view your average news article and parse it down to truth.

First, let's see who's talking:

thehill.com

'k. So while thehill.com has occasionally had some interesting insights, they're mostly a rumor mill that gets the shit the bigger slop farms ignore. And considering what a swillhole WaPo has become, that doesn't leave much.

Next, let's see what they're quoting.

Nearly two-thirds of likely GOP primary voters support Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from coming into the country, a new poll found.

And look at that. They helpfully linked to the poll. By the way, this would be a great time to pimp Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise which, among many other fascinating breakdowns of statistics, absolutely reams the fuck out of every pollster you've never heard of. Have we heard of this pollster?

Hell to the no.

Okay, let's look at the actual study.

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damn. That'll teach me to copy-paste from Scribd. Anyway - this is a self-reporting popup survey from people who happened to be surfing Bloomberg.com on December 8. Their methodology statement is three sentences long, which basically means "we gave people a bunch of survey buttons and they mashed on them like drunken monkeys." To say it's of dubious analytical value is like saying Ann Coulter is a mildly-annoying woman.

Anyway. let's dig a little deeper:

When told both sides of the argument, support for Trump’s proposal remained relatively unchanged at 64 percent.

"Told both sides of the argument" means:

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Fuck you, Scribd. Basically they blew two sentences on saying "Donald Trump says it'll be only temporary, but leaders have condemned him because blah blah ISIS." "Told both sides of the argument" is a lot like that line in Blues Brothers: "we got both kinds of music, country AND western."

Aaaaaanyway.

The online poll conducted Wednesday also found that about 37 percent of those surveyed would be more likely to vote for the businessman after his call to temporarily halt Muslims from entering the United States until elected leaders can “figure out what’s going on.”

And 46 percent said it made no difference, and 16 percent said it made them want to vote for him less, and the margin of error (calculated using Buhlschitter's Rectal Extraction Theorem) is 4%.

But you clicked on it, and it made you fearful, because for some reason (hint: CPM!), thehill.com wants you to think that 600 chuckleheads reading Bloomberg on a Tuesday night are somehow representative of the country, even though in order to be polled they needed to not be running adblock or a popup blocker.

chillax.

Quite often, however, the Trump’s-really-got-a-chance! case is rooted almost entirely in polls. If nothing Trump has said so far has harmed his standing with Republicans, the argument goes, why should we expect him to fade later on?

One problem with this is that it’s not enough for Trump to merely avoid fading. Right now, he has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among the roughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican. (That’s something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.)

So what's going on is the media is feeding on the fear that holy shit The Donald might maybe sort of kind of have a chance at the presidency. If I'm not mistaken, the last election cycle they were saying the same thing about Herman Cain.

Shit ain't real until Newt Gingrich promises Florida a moon base. Until then, it's still pre-primary foofraw. For example, that very same poll The Hill is freaking out about also says more Republicans are going to vote for Rubio than Trump, which nullifies the entire issue.*

Feel better? This is the sort of shit they're supposed to teach you in social studies. Please tell me they are.

Well, these are split into GOP Primary voters and Dem Primary voters, which leaves me a bit confused about the methodology. Of course, most online polls are pretty well meaningless. In this case though, they say they polled (self-identified) likely general election voters, but split it into primaries. Which may be a way to separate them without saying "Democrats vs Republicans" but could also be indicative of the more extreme views generally associated with likely primary voters.

Plus, even given how salient these issues are, most of these are going to be latent opinions and not really matter in the long run.