According to most election polls over the past few weeks, Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump in most states, often by double-digits. On leadership ability, most responders to these polls also favor Biden over Trump. Because of this, most election experts and their models predict a massive blue wave that will bring Biden and the other Democrats into office.
Another poll, however, seems to run against this idea: a plurality of Americans (roughly 39 percent) think their neighbors will vote for Trump. Not only does this cast doubt on other polls showing Biden in the lead, it also casts doubt on the very idea of polling itself. If the phenomenon of the “shy Trump voter” is real and the polls seem incapable of accounting for this, then the polls are never going to be accurate.
Perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that election polls and the models based on them are passé. They are the obsolete remnant of the 20th century that believed in reducing everything to scientific, quantifiable data. To work, they rely on a tolerant political climate, cooperative participants, and objective data compilers and analysts. In each of these regards, none of these factors exist today, and Democrats have only themselves to blame for it since they have subordinated everything to their political agenda.
This can be seen most easily with the first factor: tolerance. In their more liberal days, Democrats used to preach tolerance, but as a more activist, socialist Left has taken over the party, tolerance has now morphed into enthusiastic validation. While tolerance can allow for disagreement, the command to celebrate minority populations, habits, and opinions equates disagreement with rank bigotry.
This means that it’s not enough for Christians simply to allow gay couples to marry and adopt children while also personally finding it immoral; they must bake them cakes, take photos, and give their full enthusiastic support to something that violates their religious convictions. Otherwise, they are bigots whose very existence makes homosexuals feel unsafe. The same applies to a host of other issues, leading to a whole slew of minority groups now claiming to feel unsafe and threatened by the existence of people who don’t share their enthusiasms. Hence, as the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden demonstrated, what leftists fear most are violent white supremacists who might not believe in climate change.
Ironically, the Left’s demand for validation causes this pathological intolerance of conservatives. They will censor,doxx, ridicule, heckle, demonize, sue, blackball, harass, and brutalize conservatives until they are marginalized into oblivion. Knowing this, most Republican responders stay mum when asked who they will vote for and what they believe. To call them “shy” is an understatement—they are understandably scared.
They are also busy. Few people have the time or wherewithal to answer a survey and go into depth about their political views. They have too many distractions at hand. Relatively new innovations like smartphones and high-speed internet have only made this problem worse. With the proliferation of so many new conveniences, every old inconvenience is all the more annoying. Therefore, taking a short phone call (who does phone calls anymore?) is seen as a huge imposition with which most people won’t bother. Clumsy efforts to make polling more convenient with notoriously spotty online polls don’t fix this issue either.
Perhaps the biggest problem with polls is the pollsters. As we are coming to understand with presenting objective news coverage, there is very little incentive these days to have an objective poll. Today’s audiences want something fast and narrative-related (i.e., partisan), not necessarily accurate or complex. If CNN or the New York Times issued polls that favored Republicans, readers would be furious and find some other news source.
This is especially true with left-leaning audiences who have been conditioned by narratives to the detriment of facts. Over the course of many decades, biased and emotion-driven coverage masquerading as objective journalism has created an audience that struggles to empathize with the other side or think through multifaceted issues in much depth. In other words, Democratic voters simply can’t handle bad news or unfavorable polls.
As a result, those making and analyzing the polls will serve up false information if it means they will be rewarded as a result. Like the Roman augurs who read the entrails of chickens and prophesied victory for a popular general, pollsters develop models based on a multitude of recorded data and prophesy victory for the Democratic candidate. If their predictions prove right, they will enjoy ever more prestige; if they are wrong, they can blame a rigged system (the modern equivalent of saying the gods are angry).
Most polls today merely serve the purpose of gaslighting Americans. They reinforce the idea that Republicans are in the minority, Trump is a failure, the 2020 election is a foregone conclusion. On a more sinister level, they also provide grounds for Biden refusing to concede if he actually loses the election by anything less than a total landslide.
Rather than rely on polls, Americans should look at what is really happening and apply some common sense to what it means. Republican voters have good reason to hope that the majority of their countrymen support President Trump and the GOP agenda. Adam Mill enumerates those reasons at American Greatness, citing skyrocketing gun ownership (and a corresponding concern for gun rights), Biden’s wobbly and inconsistent campaign, the unpopularity of political correctness, the depopulation of blue states, Biden’s failed presidential runs in the past, and Trump’s high-energy campaign. These facts are based in reality, something Republican voters must embrace before they lose their nerve.
By contrast, the polls and accompanying narratives are complete perception. Democrats learned the hard way in the 2016 election that the postmodern doctrine that “perception is reality” is an utter falsehood. Unfortunately, their answer to this is to manipulate perception all the more, even if it destroys every remaining shred of credibility in the media and government.
For their part, Republicans need to take heed and avoid making the same mistake. In truth, it is they who have the power to make perception a reality, not Democrats. With this in mind, they must hold fast, trust in their fellow Americans, and not be deterred by lopsided polls.
Further, don’t take the number of candidate yard signs, or lack thereof, to be meaningful. Dem voters will gladly put signs in their yards supporting their candidates as a way of virtue signalling.
Repub voters don’t put signs in their yards for fear that a leftist mob will at best destroy the signs and at worst do damage to their property.
Here in Seattle in my neighborhood there are numerous Biden/Harris signs. There aren’t any Trump signs, not one.
I was driving around in Trump Country in a semi-rural area of PA last week. I saw many Biden and “Bye-Don” signs but only a few Trump signs. I said to myself, “How could this be?” and then I realized that houses with no signs were Trump households. So every house without a sign is a Trump house. That’s what wen
99.9% of the media’s reporting is fake news. Why would their poll statistics be any different? Their lies are not worth our time.
Idiocracy is real, it’s only a matter of time before the USA is at a societal level of Mexico and Africa, it’s inevitable, if you add up all the variables(too many to list here, if you don’t have a clear understanding of physics, psychology, history, formal logic, and biology, you are hopeless on understanding how and why populations change, and the possibilities, and outcomes of those changes). If the goals of a society are lofty and unobtainable, and uneducated easily manipulated people are the majority in a democracy this is what you end up with big cults with charismatic leaders posing as political parties. Nation of clown sheep.
Too, bad AG change comment section…another reason the polls were wrong last time and probably this time , as well, are the polls fail to account for the voters who had not voted in the last election.
I studied the polls in 2016…learned a lot about weighing, likely vs registered voters and how national polls are almost meaningless. I intend to do the same as the election draws nearer.
This is an excellent point: who they poll does not match who votes or voted last time. We see the same problem with polls that oversample Democrats by 5-10%. With a near 50-50 split, it’s ridiculous to poll that wide a disparity unless you’re trying to influence outcomes
First. Here in a safe and peaceful suburban community, we still will not use a Trump bumper sticker or place a Trump sign in our yard. We do fly an American flag as do many of our neighbors.
Second, virtually no one attends Biden events. It appears that they don’t support Joe but instead are against Trump, a less “motivating” impulse.
Positive vs negative. We win.
To pollsters I lean a little to the left of Pol Pot just to throw their numbers off.
An English teacher on polls? Look, only 4 years ago the polls just before election day were pretty accurate. They had Hills one electoral vote ahead of Trump. Since I knew that the pollsters were still lying, and I knew there were some shy voters in key states, I was confident Trump would win the following Tuesday.
This time the pollsters are lying even more than last time. Typically they use registered voters instead of likely voters and fiddle with the Dem/Rep breakdown. There *are* some shy Trump voters, but I doubt they explain double digit losses for Trump.
Trump may or may not win, but the polls so far are tremendously manipulated. This itself is a travesty.
Well, how about this: on these pages we read about the TIP and their plan to extend the election thru the new year. Wouldn’t a natural part of the deception involve convincing the electorate prior to the election that Trump couldn’t possibly win based on the polling? This would give them one more talking point post election.
It seems the polls are being used to ‘shape’ opinions and influence the election, not determine voters opinions.
Why would that benefit anyone? Why would anyone shell out money for a poll to be deliberately flawed, or perhaps why would every poll–including those released by American Greatness for instance–purposefully attempt to somehow change influence voters’ opinions? You can attempt to reason and assume your way into oblivion, but if polls were consistently wrong, then they would either learn to adapt or cease to exist due to lack of anyone taking them seriously.
If these are phone based polls, very few professionals will participate, such as the Conservatives who hold executive and professional positions. If you’re not in my contact list, I don’t answer the call. If your call has merit, leave a voice mail, and I will call you back. The ones most likely to answer are the millennials in Mom’s basement, looking to talk to someone. However, will they vote if it is inconvenient?
I like the thesis of this article: Ignore the polls that predict a blue wave; they are useless. How do we know they are useless? Because other polls show that 39% of Americans think their neighbor will vote Trump; these polls are useful. Ridiculous! Polls cannot be useless in one case and useful in another.