Author’s Note: I first penned my expanded opinion on political polling nearly two years ago, a few months before a hellish 2022 mid-term most of you reading this journal expected to be a major rebound providing much needed acceleration into the 2024 presidential cycle. That clearly did not happen, partially on account of bold theatrics in Arizona, and what we have now come to realize is deliberately engineered carnage stemming from the corruption of voter rolls and the near mastery of Democrat ballot harvesting efforts throughout the country, but particularly in the Midwest.
Much has changed since I first put these thoughts out into cyberspace, including the addition of many thousands of new subscribers who have never viewed the original. When and where relevant, I will refurbish old thoughts and revise them for the present day as this year goes on. My opinions on polling in the here and now of 2024 will follow the republication of the original text:
Original
It is important to understand the intent behind everything, especially those things that are foisted upon the public. I regularly ask for a show of hands at my speaking appearances to see how many people in the audience have been polled for any of the last two presidential elections. Without fail, that number is always in the low single digits as a percentage. With such a diverse nation in terms of economic, religious, ethnic, and ideological backgrounds, it is only logical that polling is at best a “stab in the dark,” and at worst, an attempt at manipulation.
Thomas Jefferson would have hated modern day media polling and the halfwits behind the practice. He is responsible for one of the best lines regarding how he felt about propagandists and manipulators when he wrote, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” In fairness, I will acknowledge the usefulness of polling as a tool. I have run my own polls on my social media channels as an azimuth check to find out, just in general, what people think. That may have to do with preference for merchandise, or it may be a sincere inquiry into the thoughts of our movement on a current hot topic.
Any statewide campaign will hire at least one pollster to do a “temperature check” around the state to see how their candidate is faring regionally. The bigger the state, the more detail needs to go into the poll. Texas itself is vast in more ways than just land area. Many different cultures and economies alter the state’s political environment. A statewide candidate will need to know how he is running in the all-white, agriculture driven Panhandle, the diverse metropolitan and suburban areas (88% of the vote in Texas is urban or suburban), or the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley. With semi-accurate polling, he or she will know which areas to focus on to have the requisite support needed for a statewide victory.
Even the most honest pollster in that scenario will tell his candidate that he has a certain margin of error, typically 2-4 points depending on sample size and methodology, based on proven accuracy over time. That means if he tells a candidate he is winning by 6, and he wins by anywhere from 2-10 points, the poll is deemed accurate. In summary, even honest polls have serious shortcomings that are blind to certain variables in the political environment, like social desirability bias or the unexpected turnout of low propensity voters for dynamic, once in a lifetime candidates.
Mainstream media polling is designed to do precisely two things. The first is to suppress the turnout of voters who will support candidates the political establishment does not welcome. Currently, those candidates are the America First brand of grassroots conservatives who espouse Trumpian policy that seeks to use America’s resources for the betterment of America, instead of the rest of the world (what a novel concept!). This is not necessarily an anti-Republican technique, because if and when the grassroots left overthrows the Democrat establishment, as the grassroots right did to the GOP in 2016, the media will align around weak, spineless, “moderate” RINO Republicans like Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, or Lindsey Graham.
The media execute this point without shame. That is why you saw the national polling numbers in 2016 reflecting a double digit Clinton landslide. The media are biased, but not all of those within big media are dumb. Some of their older political pundits knew Clinton was in jeopardy the moment they observed Trump campaigning heavily in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, rather than fortifying Republican states their colleagues swore were in jeopardy. The goal of the suppression polling was to dent Republican support just enough that the tipping point states would not tip to the GOP column. They failed.
The second point of media polling is to justify final election outcomes. This is often combined with the standard suppression polling outlined above, like when ABC News/Washington Post tried to con people into believe a non-campaigning, senile political retread would not only flip Wisconsin, but win it by 17 points. A 17-point win in Wisconsin, far bigger than Obama’s 2008 landslide, would align with a victory of over 650,000 votes in margin. They knew it wasn’t possible, but it didn’t stop them their attempt at blatant deception.
When Biden supposedly won Wisconsin by less than a point, all the media had to do was say, “well, every poll leading up to the election had a Biden win on the horizon, and even though Trump closed the gap, it wasn’t quite enough.” You must make people swallow bitter pills, and media information operations are a critical part of that.
They use these planted seeds of misinformation to telegraph when a red state like Arizona or Georgia is going to flip, leading the way with deliberately misrepresented polling numbers. Soon, you will see it coming after Texas with greater frequency.
ABC News/Washington Post’s Wisconsin poll turned out to be more than 16 points off in the certified results, and most likely at least 21 points off of reality had the Badger State conducted a first-world election in 2020.
Your task is to stick to the facts and fundamentals of election forecasting, and to ignore pollsters, realizing they are generally dishonest people fulfilling a dishonest agenda. Oppose the tyranny over the mind of man and fire back with straight facts. Starve the dishonest media and plant your own seeds of freedom by setting someone free in the mind today.
2024 Addendum
Polls were all over the place in the 2022 election cycle, with none more memorable than those showing Kari Lake constantly leading Katie Hobbs in nearly every poll conducted within weeks of the election. One local news poll, done by Fox 10 Phoenix, had Lake up by 11!
You’d have to be living in a cave to be unaware that President Trump is dominating Joe Biden in not only swing-state polling, but even polling for the national popular vote. In nearly the entire gamut of polls, Trump is running 7-10% stronger than he did in 2020, when my numbers suggest a popular vote win of 3.5% in the incumbent’s favor in an election free of deliberate demolition. This doesn’t mean that all is well in polling world – Marquette Law School, in embarrassing fashion, somehow let a Haley +15 poll against Joe Biden in Wisconsin out the door last month, failing to check any recent, or not-so-recent, statistics. 4 of the last 6 presidential elections in Wisconsin have been decided by less than a point, and not even Republicans Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan in 49-state landslides could carry the Badger State by more than 10 points. Embarrassing, indeed – but done for a reason.
In that example, and in others, Haley is being propped up against Joe Biden while the media focus on Trump’s recent victories in the glass half empty approach – “see, 30% of Republican voters want someone other than Trump!” In order to go with the grain of the obvious, which is Trump’s amplified popularity, and still run the polling shaping operation, they have currently settled on manipulating data on “what ifs” about potential Trump indictments, how voters feel about candidate age, and anything else favoring Haley, who struggles to capture even a quarter of the votes of real Republicans.
But what about Trump’s leads over Biden?
Is it possible the media are simply reporting an immutable truth, that Trump is trouncing Biden head-to-head, which also seems to confirm my analysis, and the analysis of others, that Trump won in 2020, too? Yes – but even then, they are reluctantly giving up that Biden is a dud by keeping margins as tight as possible in many cases – Pennsylvania +2, Wisconsin dead heat, etc. I have come to believe in recent months that pro-Trump polling is designed to shove Biden out of the race, which is failing miserably.
If Trump’s polling leads sound too good to be true, then what may lurk around the corner is a narrative of Biden’s comeback story – when it becomes do or die to keep Trump away from the White House after Nikki Haley, Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and the rest of the Bond villains fail to use the judicial corruption realm to prevent Trump’s inevitable rise.
Unless, that is, you thought they were just going to let him waltz back to the White House.
No waltzing, but I bet Trump's dance card is full of uniparty thugs hoping to land a spot in his administration, should that be allowed to happen.
Excellent analysis once again. Thanks Seth!