The venerable Dick Morris this week revealed that the manipulation of polling data goes even deeper than many of us thought.
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We’ve all been long aware (though many tend to ignore it in practice) that the polls have been corrupted to the point of worthlessness. It has become standard among many (myself among them) to add 3 to 5% to all poll results for the GOP – the higher the better, usually – which in many cases gives totals very close to real-world results. This was reinforced this summer by the scandals involving primary poll results involving Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed, who was given double-digit leads in the Michigan Democrat senatorial primary but barely eked out a 1% victory, and the Florida Democrat senatorial primary, in which ex-military hustler Alexander Vindman held a polling lead of nearly twenty points but lost to socialist Angie Nixon by 12 points. Only world-class naivety can excuse dependence on polls from this point on.
But it’s not only results. There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and the pollsters have used considerable ingenuity in assuring that numbers say the right things about the right people.
Morris, who could look healthier, reports on a study by Patrick Ruffini at Echelon Insights. Ruffini analyzed the results of several hundred polls taken during congressional election campaigns over the years. He discovered that pollsters have been regularly overstating the numbers for Democrat candidates in the months leading up to the election, with emphasis on the summer months. Then, during the final weeks of the campaign, the pollsters carefully “ratchet back” their results, bringing them into sync with the actual voter sentiment going into election day. “They’re wrong in July and August,” Dick tells us, “then they get more and more correct as September and October roll around, so as not to be embarrassed in November.”
This seems like a lot of effort for scant payoff, but a little thought puts it into perspective. Those inflated numbers aren’t aimed at the voters (who pay no attention to the elections until after Labor Day), or even the Democrats. They’re aimed at the Republicans, particularly all those fellows of the Russell Kirk Institute for Defeatism Studies, ever ready to look at the week’s results, fall on their knees, and go into the time-honored cries of, “It’s over… Nothing can be done… Let’s all go home now…”
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That’s how it’s gone this summer. The polls tell us that the Democrats are seven or more points up over the GOP (some of them much more, I’m sure. I haven’t bothered to check) and will sail to victory without breaking a sweat. And some GOP figures are convinced, along with people who should know better, like Benny Thompson and Mark Halperin. This, concerning a party that is broke, that has been slammed by scandal after scandal, that is being rent in twain by their socialist spawn, and that voters – many of them longtime, diehard voters – are fleeing like the dogs and cats of Pompeii. All because of those numbers. From the polls. On the screen.
The take-home here is straightforward: screw the polls. Dick Morris is perfectly correct: it’s an industry run by leftists and Democrats, and the devil can take ‘em. It’s a bogus industry, it has always been a bogus industry, and it will always be a bogus industry in lieu of massive reforms that aren’t coming. We’ve known this for years. This new study is simply Exhibit B. (And kindly don’t bring up “Abracadabra Polls… they’re pretty good.” It’s all the same industry.)
Fortunately, there are people who have never bought in, and they include Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JD, and Mario. So eat your Wheaties, saddle up, and follow the flag.
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Image: Mark Taylor