Another Look At Why Political Polls Can’t Be Trusted
There are many reasons you can’t believe political polls, including the fact that Republicans have been weaponizing them to make themselves appear relevant.
That nauseating feeling you get in the pit of your stomach every time you see a poll showing that President Joe Biden is trailing former twice-impeached president* Donald J. Trump is by design. Political polling has devolved into another form of weaponized politics aimed at creating the illusion that Republicans (GOP) — the party that has been turned into a criminal enterprise by their treasonous leader who is an adjudicated fraud, insurrectionist, and rapist that has been indicted four times and is facing 91 felonies so far — and their policies are more popular than they actually are.
We’re constantly bombarded with dreadful information about Biden being historically unpopular and old, being weighed down by inflation and multiple world crises, immigration, and all kinds of other fabricated maladies that indicate that people just don’t like him or his policies. In fact, this has reportedly been happening since prior to the 2022 midterms, when the “red wave” was going to take over the U.S. and return Congress to the GOP, giving them solid majorities in both chambers.
But that never happened.
That polling was intentionally skewered. Democrats held the Senate, and the GOP won such a narrow majority in the House that the GOP spent all of 2023 infighting amongst themselves and removing leaders. The slim majority the GOP did have has gotten much smaller as more GOP members retired or quit, realizing that they had accomplished nothing and that their chicanery will cost them dearly in the 2024 elections. It’s glaringly evident that our political system is a majorly f*cked up wet dream.
So what happened to the media’s claim of Democrats being wiped out in 2022? A deep dive by Jay Kuo and the Big Picture reveals the answers to those questions. Weeks prior to the 2022 midterms, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg was sounding the alarm, but nobody was listening: “In six major battleground states, more than half the polls conducted in October have been conducted by Republican firms… Basically we can’t trust the data on RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight any longer… it’s essentially Republican propaganda,” he reportedly told Joy Reid on MSNBC 8 days before the election.
GOP Partisan Bias Is Skewering Polls
It was noted by Rosenberg at the time that the two main poll agglomeration sources had been corrupted by a flood of Republican polling and he was ignored and ridiculed by our corporate media. Jay Kuo penned a piece explaining that Rosenberg was correct, further noting that if you screened the polls that were partisan and biased, the story around the results of the midterms were much different. A series of polls that showed the GOP having a “red wave” appeared to be driven by pollsters with strong GOP partisan biases. Non-partisan polling told a very different story of an election that was pretty much dead even.
Kuo’s report found that one of the key issues surrounding the 2022 polling was the fact that major media was completely absent from the polling prior to the 2022 election. Major news outlets that usually commissioned quality polls simply didn’t that year. Kuo goes on to note that one thing is clear about political polling: it doesn’t make economic sense for major media companies to invest heavily into a lot of polls, which opens the door for corrupt GOP political operatives to exploit and skewer polls for multiple reasons.
However, that doesn’t justify the media’s vapid response to the polling and reporting it as fact.
Negative Polling Can Create Negative Results
Negative polling can garner extremely negative effects on campaigns for one reason: money. In America’s corrupt political system, where fraudulent corporations are considered people, courtesy of our highly politicized corrupt Supreme Court, corrupt GOP politicians rely on donations from big donors. If said corrupt GOP politician isn’t polling well, the fraudulent billionaires that own said corporations don’t donate to them, and more often-than-not, the person on the losing end of the poll ends up losing for myriad reasons, including giving up because they believe a skewered poll is legitimate when it’s not.
The same skullduggery over the polls from the past couple of years is happening again this year. Media is — purposely or not — trying to paint our treasonous orange former president* as the anointed king while painting Biden as the loser. Current polls are conducted with limited audiences which make it impossible to get reliable information and drilling down into ‘subgroups’ of the polls (Hispanic voters for example), leaves more inaccuracies and false information that shouldn’t be parroted by our corporate media as gospel when it’s not.
The dangers of having corrupt GOP pollsters flooding our media with bad polls are many. Making Biden appear to more vulnerable than he is could push undecided voters towards third party candidates, which will almost inevitably guarantee that a treasonous orange piece of GOP shit ends up back in the White House when he should be behind bars and permanently disqualified from ever holding office in this country again for what he has done.
Kuo closes, correctly, by noting that we all need to be a bit more poll savvy. Before freaking out, reporting on, or amplifying a poll, we need to understand who commissioned it, what the sample size was, how the data was compiled, and what actual experts think of it. Furthermore, we need to stop paying attention to polling averages that weigh in. Quit checking and relying on 538 and RealClearPolitics obsessively since they’ve sold their souls and are more likely to mislead than enlighten. There are too many other indications that the 2024 elections will result in another blowout blue wave, despite what the polls currently claim.
