Ignore the Polls! They’re dated relics that no longer reflect the reality of the electorate. By Auguste Meyrat
https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/12/ignore-the-polls/
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.
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