The Next "Dirty Trick:" Suppression Polling
The Latest Monmouth Poll has Virginia's Governor Race Tied. Watch For an ABC/Washington Post Poll or Others to Suppress GOP Vote. It's Been Done It Before.
Click on your favorite internet search engine (mine is duckduckgo.com) and type in “polling failures.” You might be surprised just how many writers, bloggers, and election analysts criticized the quality of political polling both in 2016 and 2020.
“The Worst Polling Failure in American History.”
“Why Were Polls So Wrong in the 2020 Election”
“2020 Is Another Embarrassing Failure for Election Pollsters.”
And that’s just the first page. It’s not the first time polling has been wrong, but not like this, and not recently. Remember the famous 1948 presidential election? That’s when an “unpopular” incumbent, Democrat Harry Truman, was supposed to be trounced by Republican Thomas Dewey. There were two other former Democrats on the ballot. Truman still won.
The Gallup Poll, the leading political poll of the day, took a massive credibility hit. Gallup was correct primarily leading up to the three prior presidential elections but used a technique known as “quota sampling,” which consistently overestimated the Republican vote.
That leads us to a poll for the upcoming November 2nd Virginia election. The latest, Monmouth University, has Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin tied at 46% each among registered (not “likely”) voters, a 5 point shift from their previous poll when McAuliffe was polling ahead. Given that Democrats have run the table the past two statewide elections, aided by the deep blue northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, Democrats are in panic mode. Given the small GOP sample (23%), the failure to poll “likely voters,” and polling over a weekend, a no-no among credible campaign pollsters (that usually favors Democrats for some reason), it means that Youngkin is ahead.
It is time to watch for dirty tricks.
We’ve already begun to see the “dark money” flyers and the use of a Democratic PAC, with $200,000 from a sleazy public utility, Dominion Energy, to suppress the GOP vote in rural counties by questioning Youngkin’s allegiance to the 2nd Amendment. But the one to watch is a poll whose results are so bad, even unbelievable, that it appears designed to suppress Republican turnout.
One need only revisit a Washington Post/ABC poll of Wisconsin in 2020 for an example. Conducted October 20-25, 2020 - just before the election - it showed Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by a margin of 17 points.
The actual margin on election day? Less than one percent, or 20,000 “votes.” Some say that no pollster wants to be wrong. But to be this wrong, this badly? It led me to conclude that it was a suppression poll, especially given how widely the media reported it.
Having experience in 35 US House and Senate campaigns, have I seen polls deliberately skewed to obtain a specific result to meet a particular objective, including candidate recruitment? Yes. I saw one during a campaign I worked on in 1990. I will not disclose the author of that poll to protect the guilty. I know of others. Fortunately, they are rare. But they happen.
Since we have confirmed that Democrats are already trying to suppress the GOP vote for the upcoming election, it is fair to assume that another suppression poll, maybe two, is on its way. When? Likely early next week after visits to Virginia by former President Barack Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Georgia election-denier Stacey Abrams, after another weekend in the field.
You would be wise to ignore future polling in this contest.