Said Donald Trump, talking to Joe Rogan the other day.
"But I shouldn't say that 'cause I'm doing very, you know, really well in the polls..... But no, I honestly believe that there's probably a lot of fraud. I had a poll Washington Post/ABC in the Hillary thing on Wisconsin. They had me down 17 points the day before the election. I knew it was wrong because I had a rally. I had 29,000 people at a racetrack. And it was like zero degrees. Wisconsin. And they had me down 17 points. In other words, you had no chance. And I won. And I called up my pollster, good guy, good, good guy.... I said, tell me, why did they have me down so much? I mean nobody's gonna believe 'em the next time. They said, they don't care when you're down 17 points. People are gonna stay home. They're not gonna vote. Right. Because they're gonna say, I love Trump, but I'm not gonna waste my time. It's cold out. I said, but why did they make it four or five? He said at four or five they're gonna go and vote. At 17, they're not gonna go and vote."
And here's Peter Pomerantsev in The Guardian: "Polling has turned the US election into a game. We need to take a reality check."
I’ve... noticed how, after a good [poll], I will look for a bad poll to bring me down, as if I’m trying to prick the balloon of self-confidence and remind myself of “reality.”
But the polls never do quite take you to reality. Instead, they shape it. It’s not just what the polls are saying, or even how they were put together, that’s the great problem here – it’s how the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.
Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport of feuding personalities. Who’s up? Who’s down? What tactics have they used to get one over on each other? What does it say about their personality? Words are seen as weapons with which politicians show off their ability to subvert or scare the opposition – not as substantive statements about what they intend to do.
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The ONLY time the media starts denigrating polls is when Democrats are failing badly in them.
--- it’s how the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.
AA, they mean you, too.
sometimes you go by feelz.
As always polls will become more alike as the election approaches. A few, very few will be outliers. The pack will feel comforted by getting close or even a miss (we ALL missed). The outliers get fame (and fortune) and bragging rights for the next cycle.
Then we'll get the postmortems.... we missed because XYZ. Next time (we promise) we'll have this corrected.
In the mean time oversampling, details in the tabs are, if not hidden, not showcased. The BIG, and expensive, polls will have fewer responses than most can imagine. And their efforts only get responses by a very few they try to reach. But even these numbers are sliced and diced into age, race, education, voting habits, etc. So the big news is... a tiny sliver of a small sample reveals - ta-da!!!!
Feh.
Haven't we usually seen news stories about the Scholastic Weekly Reader Presidential Poll by this point in an election? I can't find anything about the results they have for 2024.
Trump once again undermining our "democracy", casting doubt on the polling that increasingly forms the entire basis of our MSM political coverage. The idea!
The game has changed. Real polling is 10x more expensive than a decade ago because it takes so much more time and effort to get a representative sample size. That's why the Harris campaign rolling out the Obamas to appeal to Black men is so intriguing. Media polls have Black men moving slightly towards Trump, but to use your big guns in Barack and Michele to nail down this demographic tells you their internal polls must be very worrisome.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
Media polls are bs. Many if not all are trying to create an impression favorable to their candidate.
The polling pros that the candidates pay for are most likely to be fairly accurate. Of course, one cannot poll the dead people who unanimously vote Democrat.
Must watch!!
Danny Polishchuk
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BREAKING NEWS: Kamala Harris Goes On The Joe Rogan Podcast
https://x.com/Dannyjokes/status/1850239837191704985
I remember in the 2004 election when the exit polls on election day were supposedly showing a strong move towards Kerry in places like Alabama. VP Cheney was interviewed sometime during the day on this --back when he was still a Republican and not supporting radical left-wing Democrats for President- and him saying, yeah, there's no way that's happening, our own internal numbers are completely opposite from that. It's really been since then I've thought, polls can't be trusted because that's just so bizarre, there was no way John Kerry was going to win states like Alabama. Which I hadn't really thought much about polls before. But I think the 2004 election may have been the first one where there was a organized effort to use the polls to manipulate the results.
I don't follow the major polls because, as Ms. Althouse points out, the polls are used to achieve results and implement trends, not measure them. I do occasionally follow Rich Baris, the People's Pundit, who streams on both YouTube and Rumble. He can be a bit long-winded, but he lays out his cases and shows his supporting data and rationale. Right now, there's such a widening gulf between the 'poll data' and the Election Betting Odds, that something smells - and it's too strong a smell to ignore, even though they are obviously not directly comparable.
You have to answer the phone - EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO IT IS. And we know important people never do that. So don't bitch about not being polled ffs.
I think a number of news outlets aren't trying to push a specific candidate so much as push the narrative that the race is dead even. Bret Baier, for example, seems REALLY committed to that storyline, and I suspect the Fox polling/election desk is happy to oblige the notion that this year is a repeat of 2000 because they know Trump is actually somewhat ahead and getting stronger.
"Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport of feuding personalities. "
Polls perform no function other than to reinforce the tribal nature of our politics. I eschew them.
Everyone does it. The polls are wrong! except then they showcase my team winning!
I hit the 'Block' button, nowadays. I'm always being inundated with pollers and fundraisers. Whenever I've taken a polling call, it's always a 'push' poll, where they start to steer you about 4 or 5 questions into the 'survey'. Ugh.
Fake. Needs more word salad…
Pollsters text me but think I’m Khin. I am not Khin. What if I responded?
Me too.
Campaigns need polls, of course, but they do their own.
Then there’s Fox…So not all.
Polls are also a communal pastime. Polls hold a mirror up to the public. In the reflection we see ourselves in relation to our fellow citizens.
We know the election is a deadheat precisely because so many polls are telling us that. Otherwise, how would we have known that?
In the end, it’s tough to think about this topic without getting philosophical -- the question of determinism comes to mind quite quickly. It may already be perfectly clear who wins but polling may make us believe it’s unclear and either candidate has a good chance. And once it turns out to be X, everybody will either run around saying “told you so”, or “it was a toss up as I’ve said, and X turned out marginally ahead”. If one wins outright, nobody will speak about the polls anymore anyway.
What if we paid no attention to the electoral polls at all? What would we lose? What might we pay attention to instead?
Not all polls are fraudulent by design but it would not surprise me if 75% of them are. There was a poll in the 2016 election that I thought was a pretty clever design- it was run by the University of Southern California that didn't try to poll a random 500 people every couple of weeks- it polled the same group of people, carefully selected at the beginning, over and over for months. Not surprisingly, that poll showed a lot less variance than the random polls that could go from Hillary leading by 5% to Hillary leading by 13% (the WaPo/ABC poll if memory serves).
If you ask the right questions, you NEVER have to worry about the answers. That the left is committing so much violence against Trump supporters only supports the wise move by many on the right to NOT answer questions/polls, etc.
Now, examine closely what Peter Pomerantsev writes in The Guardian essay:
"I’ve... noticed how, after a good [poll], I will look for a bad poll to bring me down, as if I’m trying to prick the balloon of self-confidence and remind myself of “reality.”
This goes both ways and I suspect he is actually lying here in this piece about what he does in response to good news because it is far more likely that people go looking for the good poll when they see the bad one- I know I do that preferentially. In other words, he wouldn't be writing this particular essay were the polling showing nothing but good news for Harris and he is trying to buck the spirits of the Left before the election. If the polling were generally looking favorable to Harris, his essay this morning would be lauding the polls and denigrating all of the ones that showed the race closer or the other way around.
Polls don't matter. In the modern era, you can tell what's happening merely by observing it yourself. Trash tier newspapers telling you Trump was garbage on Rogan? Uh, no, turns out that's one of his most popular bits ever on YouTube alone. Theo Von, Break50- people admire Trump greatly and aren't shy to say it.
By contrast, people are increasingly embarrassed to endorse Kamala Harris and the oligarchs giving her money are hedging their bets.
I think that if you want a really good political poll- here is what you have to do:
(1) Carefully select about 1500-2000 people with a known demographic profile in regards to age, education, work history, party affiliation, and geographic location.
(2) Pay them enough for their responses so that they do respond every time.
That is the minimum of what you have to do to identify trends. How it relates to the actual outcome will still depend on how well you use the demographic data to model the turnout but it will put you on a firmer foundation that just about any other method of polling by eliminating the problems of response rates.
oh my goodness
And ask yourself what Bich would be writing about the polling if Harris were shown to be firmly on her way to victory this morning? Would Bich be writing that you shouldn't be paying attention to the polling or even writing that the race was a "dead heat" (that is not what the polling shows, though one would be wise to not believe Trump is on his way to victory because of it)?
I am from New Hampshire, and I know plenty of people who have been contacted by polls...every four years, after which we become invisible again.
The above is the more concise version of what I write below.
"What if we paid no attention to the electoral polls at all? What would we lose? What might we pay attention to instead?"
Policies and performance.
People won't pay for such a poll.
People WILL pay for a poll that says they're ahead.
So that's what the pollsters produce.
That was hilarious but Rehajm is correct- the real Harris wouldn't have been so concise and to the point. That video will probably be fact-checked by Glenn Kessler, Politico, and Snopes.
It was zero degrees in Wisconsin in the days leading up to the 2016 election?
Not according to what the thermometer said.
I probably should have written "accurate" in place of "good".
IIRC that's what Rassmussen has done with some of their tracking polls.
In the mid 90s, Dick Morris would come back to Bill Clinton with "poll results" about a specific issue in a day or two. He was pulling them out of his butt.
"I had a rally. I had 29,000 people at a racetrack. And it was like zero degrees. Wisconsin. And they had me down 17 points. In other words, you had no chance."
Nowhere was Trump say it was LITERALLY ZERO DEGREES. He says
it was "Like zero degrees". But he does say it was COLD. But thanks the person who "fact checked" Trump. Because it allows to point out the game CNN and the MSM have played for 9 years.
Whenever Trump engages in humor, hyperbole, sarcasm, irony, speculates, or makes a nuanced or ambigious statement, the MSM looks at it, and thinks "If we lie and say Trump said this literally and without qualification, can we make him look bad?"
And if they can, thats what they do. And they say Trump is liar because "fact check". Confident that X number of dummies will never look up the original Trump quote.
"Pollsters text me but think I’m Khin. I am not Khin."
Just tell them you're his neighbor and take the poll - as his 'next of Khin'.
Temperature Gate. Subpoenas must fly.
There are good polls and bad polls and dishonest polls. I listen to a few people who are reliable experts on polling to understand their interpretations of all those dots on a map.
The media is transparent about what they want the polls to say. That's another way to judge their accuracy.
"Fact-checking," on the other hand, is devious, fascistic propaganda. And it's pretty easy to figure out who installed the "experts" and funded the institution. They're actually designed to demonize real fact-checking and suppress acceptable topics of inquiry and speech.
There are good polls and bad polls and dishonest polls. I listen to a few people who are reliable experts on polling to understand their interpretations of all those dots on a map.
The media is transparent about what they want the polls to say. That's another way to judge their accuracy.
"Fact-checking," on the other hand, is devious, fascistic propaganda. And it's pretty easy to figure out who installed the "experts" and funded the institution. They're actually designed to demonize real fact-checking and suppress acceptable topics of inquiry and speech.
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