Making stuff up with numbers

Nothing wrong with the headline, as long as you don't expect headlines to be true or anything. The race might indeed be "tightening," but none of the evidence here supports such a conclusion -- mostly because the "polls" don't show anyone "tied" with anyone else. Fox isn't the only cable network to get this point wrong, but it appears to be the most consistent in lying about numbers for partisan gain, so let's have a look:

Two polls released Sunday show Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton tied with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in a likely general election race, after having a double-digit lead just months ago.
  
Clinton leads Trump 46-to-43 percent in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, compared to a similar one in April in which Clinton had an 11-point lead.

Odd. A 3-point lead wasn't a "tie" last week, when Fox reported on its own poll:

Donald Trump tops Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, according to a new Fox News Poll that also finds majorities of voters feel both frontrunners lack strong moral values and will say anything to get elected.

Trump has a 45-42 percent edge over Clinton, if the presidential election were held today.  That’s within the poll’s margin of sampling error.  Last month, Clinton was up by 48-41 percent (April 2016).

Hmm. Let's return to Sunday's story for a moment:

Earlier Sunday morning, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed voters favored Trump over Clinton 46-to-44 percent. The numbers also show Clinton losing an identical 11-point lead since earlier this spring.

Both polls were within the statistical margin of error, which means Clinton and Trump are essentially tied.

Well, no. It doesn't mean that. Not that the misperception isn't widely shared -- for example, by NBC itself (here, in its MSNBC guise):

Hillary Clinton’s advantage over Donald Trump has narrowed to just three points — resulting in a dead-heat general-election contest with more than five months to go until November, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Clinton, who remains a heavy favorite to win the Democrat nomination, leads the presumptive GOP nominee 46 percent to 43 percent among registered voters, a difference that is within the poll’s margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.1 percentage points.

NBC isn't done with the stupidz:

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