A rule of thumb for researchers: If you create a super-smart algorithm to determine, say, the best movie of 2015, and you come back with Mortdecai, that might be a sign that there’s something wrong with your research methods—not that the American people inexplicably failed to appreciate the genius of Johnny Depp mugging for the camera with a pencil thin moustache and “hilarious” British accent. Likewise, if you design a study to find the most pro-Donald Trump colleges in America, and your “research” yields that those campuses include such redoubts of right-wingery (just kidding!) as Scripps College, Wesleyan, and Hampshire, there might be something screwy with your methods.
Yet when uCribs, a website that helps college kids find apartments, released a survey that found just those results, some in the media ran with it. The website of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oregonian
The uCribs methodology was laughably bad:
In other words, that guy from your Media Studies class who is always posting online about how Trump is “just like Hitler” was counted as a Trump supporter by uCribs. (Oh, and uCribs also summarily threw out a bunch of colleges.)
Stand by for uCribs’s next blockbuster report, which will find that Trump’s biggest celebrity supporters include Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Cher.
