Peeking Behind the Polls
Polling suggests Republicans have a presidential conundrum - they favor a nominee who may not be able to beat a diminshed Joe Biden. But Democrats have one, too. Good reporting tells the real story.
Most lazy journalists allow polls and polling averages to inform their perceptions and impression of political campaigns and candidates. That’s certainly true of the burgeoning Presidential contest.
Conventional wisdom (value: practically zero) suggests that we are in for a rematch that few want: Donald Trump, the first former President since the Grover Cleveland to seek his party's nomination, versus octogenarian Joe Biden.
This is your reminder that conventional wisdom this early in a contest rarely pans out. At this stage of the 2008 election, Rudy Guiliani was the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Jeb Bush led the field for the GOP nomination around this time in 2015. How did that all work out? Normal people right now are worried about things like high school graduations and paying their mortgages and grocery bills, not about an election that, in their mind, is 18 months away.
Credit New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg for practically cementing that perception. His “indictment” of Donald Trump on 34 charges of filing false business forms for supposedly trying to hide payments to a former porn star may be rightly panned as bad and politically-motivated legal work, but it solidified GOP support for Trump. Perhaps that was the real mission. Democrats clearly believe Trump is the GOP’s most beatable nominee, and they might not be wrong.
I’m reminded of a caller from Tennessee, a school administrator, to Hugh Hewitt’s morning drive-time radio show more than a week ago. He said that while he voted for Trump twice, he had been leaning toward supporting someone else. After the indictment, he chose to rally around the former President.
He’s not alone. Polls suggest that even in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, where he was reelected with 60 percent of the vote last November, he now slightly trails Trump for the nomination. In Florida. He led Trump by nearly 20 points not long ago.
But let’s remember what polls represent - a snapshot in time that may or may not accurately reflect voter sentiments or their evolution. How samples are drawn, questionnaires are designed, and voters are interviewed all matter. And as any credible pollster will tell you, some of their polls are “outliers.” Some, sadly, are maliciously concocted and released to influence voter turnout just before an election.
Most pollsters don’t want to be wrong. But I’ve seen a few in both parties who don’t mind tipping the scales. There’s perhaps no better recent example than in 2020 when the Washington Post and ABC published a poll of Wisconsin voters just before the election that showed Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump by 17 points. Biden won Wisconsin but by about .6 percent. That was a suppression poll, its release designed to depress GOP turnout for Trump. The pollsters may deny that, but the evidence speaks volumes, especially given the Washington Post’s promotion of the Russian Collusion Hoax and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Elon Musk’s Twitter should label the Washington Post as ”state-affiliated media,” as they’ve done appropriately with the equally sycophantic National Public Radio. I have other candidates in mind.
That is why private polling is more valuable than public ones. People and campaigns who pay for private polling want valuable information, not a PR hit for or against a candidate. Those who don’t publish their polls want the inside advantage of accurate data to guide their decisions. Public pollsters are on other missions, from self-promotion to tipping the scales for candidates, political parties, and ideologies. That’s why public polling should be automatically suspect. And always take time to review the questionnaires, how the samples were drawn and their size, how respondents were queried, and the dates the surveys were in the field.
Ignore most polling and do what is right, not what “the crowd” thinks. If you want evidence of the damage succumbing to peer pressure can inflect, read the last Centers for Disease Control study of youth risk behaviors. As our culture popularizes unnatural behavior and gender confusion, they, especially young women, are becoming increasingly suicidal. It should be a wake-up call on steroids.
It’s not that polls should be ignored, but learning to analyze them in context is important. RasmussenReport.com, a favorite of many Republicans whose work has earned respect, published an “outlier” poll this week, showing Biden’s job approval a 47 percent. In contrast, after several bad weeks, most other polls report much worse for the diminished incumbent, closer to 38 percent.
Still, you should pay attention, instead, to the shrinking universe of “shoe leather” journalists like Salena Zito, who do the hard work of interviewing people and getting beneath the polling to find out the real thinking among voters, especially in bell-weather states like Pennsylvania.
At least in Pennsylvania, it turns out that voters may be telling pollsters one thing while having second thoughts.
Carol Sides of Lycoming County was torn. “It’s just that I like both of them,” she said. “I like my association with Trump and with his family. They were fun years, to say the least. But then, with DeSantis coming up and reading everything that he’s doing for Florida. I mean, he’s unbelievable for his age and his background. I think that he did a wonderful job there, and he is a gentleman beyond words, so I am undecided,” said Ms. Sides, who sits on the local county Republican committee.
She admitted she is weary of the Trump drama. The Huntingdon County Republican Committee chairman, Arnie McClure, said bluntly that he’s done with Mr. Trump. “I’d really like to move on from the drama, and I think that DeSantis gives us Trump policies without the drama,” he said.
Mr. McClure ran a poll during the county’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner two weeks ago at the height of Mr. Trump’s indictment sympathy. The former president received 112 votes, whereas Mr. DeSantis received 69. “In a county where 80 percent of the vote went to Trump, 80 percent, and DeSantis hasn’t even started running for office yet, those are pretty good numbers for the Florida governor,” Mr. McClure said.
If pollsters call these two, they would likely say they're for Trump. But see what a real reporter can do?
And Democrats should take no solace in this. Even ABC’s Martha Raddatz knows how to report once in a while. As reported by RedState.com:
Several young voters then speak to Raddatz, indicating they’d prefer a “fresher” candidate, Biden’s too old, and they aren’t particularly excited by the prospect of him seeking a second term. Twenty-one year old Elaina Symes says she wants someone more progressive than Biden, and can’t point to anything that makes her want to vote for Biden again. The one thing she likes about him? “That he’s not Trump.”
For balance, we’re introduced to Pennsylvania State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia), a Biden surrogate who insists we need four more years of Biden and for him to “finish the job,” and is shown stumping for him. Several residents from the Southwest Senior Center in Philadelphia also voice support for the president and, not surprisingly, express less concern about his age. Asked directly about whether she worries at all about Biden’s age, Nancy Gamble states, “No, not at all, no. As long as he’s getting the job done and doing what he’s supposed to do and in the right state of mind, that’s what should be required.” (YMMV as to what qualifies as to whether/how Ms. Gamble’s metric is met.)
Noting that it isn’t just age that Biden needs to consider but also the geography, given that it was the suburbs that largely landed him his 2020 victory, Raddatz moves on to Northampton County, Pennsylvania, known as a “bellwether county.” There, Steve Davis, who also voted for Biden in 2020, states that the president’s age gives him pause, as well as his ability to bring the party together. Mark Heller, sitting on his front porch, states the single reason he would vote for Joe Biden is “because I’m not going to vote for Trump — it’s that easy.”
Real reporting, until recently in short supply, matters. It suggests that, not unlike 2007 and 2015, the field is from settled and that conventional wisdom might just be wrong.
The Liberal Patriot, a favorite based Democratic blog site, outlines five reasons why Biden might be vulnerable to defeat, even by Trump, due to his extraordinarily weak candidacy, Trump’s continuing resilience, Democratic extremism on cultural issues, and their overreliance on abortion issue along with the lost of working-class voter support.
And let’s face it, Biden’s record of the past two years is pretty awful, no matter how you look at it.
Over 6.2 million illegal immigrants are crossing our border with little hope that most will attend deportation hearings.
Over $7,000 in purchasing power by the typical household lost from the highest inflation in over 40 years, which still stands at over 5 percent annually.
The loss of Afghanistan and the deaths of 13 American servicemen that evidence suggests could have been avoided.
The increasing two-tier approach to justice in America, with favored Democrats getting one kind of treatment while others do not.
A growing government-media censorship industrial complex where disfavored speech is squelched. Even Yahoo.com is apparently censoring emails sent through its servers, according to legitgov.com.
Americans often don’t get the contests or choices they want for general elections until they do. Still, there’s no question that they’re not enamored by another replay of 2020 between a diminished Joe Biden and an erratic Donald Trump. The opportunities are there, in both parties, for the right candidates with the right messages for their respective electorates.
I predict that neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump will likely be the eventual nominees. Voters might get what they want this time. Stay tuned.