We Keep On Playing Polling 'Head Games'

Duane Patterson 10:30 AM | November 04, 2024
AP Photo/Teresa Crawford

1979 was a pretty terrific year in music. After a fog of disco dominating the pop charts in the second half of the decade, rock finally made its comeback with a slew of wonderful albums that dropped that year. Whether it was Damn the Torpedoes by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Breakfast In America by Supertramp, The Pretenders' eponymous record, London Calling by the Clash, there were dozens of true rock staples that were released that magical year. One of those was the third studio release by Foreigner - Head Games. 

The title track, a driving, angry song about a relationship going south, was co-written by guitarist Mick Jones and lead singer Lou Gramm. It could easily have been written about the state of polling over the last 48 hours. 

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Head games, that's all I get from you
Head games, and I can't take it anymore
Head games
Don't wanna play the head games

Part honest assessment, part hedging bets, a healthy dose of suppression polls, sprinkle in a push poll or two, and that's what political junkies like you and me were treated to all weekend long. To regime media's credit, the volume and variety of outcomes, from national to battlegrounds and even beyond to other state polling, successfully knocked Kamala Harris' horrific news of the jobs report from last Friday from the headlines. Instead of Team Harris going into Election Day making the case that the economy is chugging along just fine despite the lasting and ongoing effects of inflation eating away at Americans' spending power, Thursday report of 100,000 fewer jobs than projected for the month of October, and August and September being revised downward by another 100,000-plus took away another final selling point from the Vice-President. It was huge negative number that should have dominated newsprint and the airwaves. Instead, we got the Selzer Poll out of Iowa. 

I'm going to do my best to filter out the noise here by giving you the top line numbers, how the left is extrapolating from some of these polls to shore up a narrative of late-breaking strength, and why the underlying data just doesn't support it at all. I'm not saying I can tell you with absolute authority I know how many people will vote tomorrow and what the final margin will be, but you can apply a bit of common sense here and there and discern what is the likeliest probable outcome. 

Let's start with Iowa. First off, Kamala hasn't set foot in that state as a presidential candidate since dropping out of the 2020 Democratic primary before the Iowa Caucus took place. Iowa voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in 2020, 53.1% to 44.9%, an 8.2% spread. The ideological makeup of Hawkeye voters was R+8. 

There were two polls released on Saturday. The first, by Emerson, showed Donald Trump increasing his margin in Iowa over Kamala Harris, surging to a 10.5% lead. An hour later, Ann Selzer reported a survey that Kamala Harris is up 3. That's a 13.5% spread between two polls in the same day. Suffice it to say, one of them is way off. 

Emerson disclosed their sample size and makeup, and it reflects close to what the state was in 2020. Selzer's data, on a whole host of subgroups, is a tad off of that. 

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Her theory is that late-breakers and undecideds, along with older women, have all of a sudden decided to go with Kamala Harris. Could that be the case? Sure. We could also get hit by an unforeseen meteor on  Tuesday as well. It's just not very likely. Now to her credit, and the main reason why the left is grappling onto her poll like it's the floating wooden board in the icy Atlantic after the Titanic split in two, is that her surveys in previous cycles have been pretty accurate. Her miss rate is usually under 2%. But here are just a few problems with her poll. 

Her poll was leaked to lefty pundits and the Harris campaign three days before dropping. They knew it was coming, and yet Harris, if Iowa is truly in play, didn't divert and make a play to finish Donald Trump off once and for all by boosting her lead outside the margin of error. You have to ask yourself why they wouldn't react and put any resources there at all. Joe Biden is available. The Clintons are available. Gwen Walz, and her hand mixer, are available. And Mark Cuban's dance card suddenly has freed up for some reason. Of course, if Harris were to win Iowa, Trump winning Pennsylvania wouldn't matter if Harris holds onto Michigan and Wisconsin. The reason Harris hasn't scheduled any event in the closing 48 hours in Iowa is because nobody outside of those suffering chronic anti-Trump fevers, believe Iowa has suddenly moved 11 points to the left in the last month. 

The Governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, threw more cold water on the Selzer poll. 

So the assumption you have to make in order to believe Selzer is seeing something nobody else is nationwide is that Republicans are voting in higher frequency earlier than ever specifically in order to cross over and vote for Kamala Harris. While at the same time, Democrats that you would think would be energized to vote against Donald Trump are laying low this time, but will all of a sudden turn out en masse on Election Day. According to Reynolds' data, these shy Republican Kamala voters went out of their way to register as Republicans first in order to get Donald Trump's hopes up and then go vote early for Harris. Sorry, that's just a little too fantastical for me to buy. 

The argument pundits on the left, and the Harris campaign itself are trying to make, that these early Republican voters are actually Harris voters, doesn't make sense, and for one good reason - the favorability index. 

In 2020, Joe Biden on Election Day was seen by the American electorate nationally as 19% more favorable than Donald Trump. 19%. If one candidate is that far upside down in likeability to his or her opponent, you may generate a ton of support on your own, as Donald Trump did, but you'll generate most of the voter turnout for your opposition as well. That's exactly what happened to Trump in '20. 81 million votes against Trump were cast. This cycle, Harris still leads Trump in favorability, but by under 4%. That's a 15-point swing. The anti-Trump sentiment just is not there in the same intensity it once was. On X, the Trump haters are all over the place, but as we've told you for a long, long time, X isn't reality when it comes to national opinion.

We are reliably told by pollsters not to make too much out of early voting. We also were told by many of these same pollsters in 2016 that early voting was way too Democratic for Donald Trump to overcome on Election Day. But let's take a look at what's happening with early voting. And the indications are not just a Battleground State phenomenon we're witnessing. It's happening all over the place. 

In Pennsylvania:

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Democrats are going into Election Day with about 700,000 fewer banked votes than Republicans...unless you're entertaining the idea that Republicans have surged in early voting more than ever in the Keystone State just so they can vote for Kamala Harris. 

In Arizona:

In Nevada: 

In fact, in Nevada, Jon Ralston, the go-to guy on the left for what to expect out of the Silver State, offers up the Dumb and Dumber line - "So you're saying there's a chance..."

Clark County alone on Saturday had a tepid response rate at best. Turning in 140,000 more before Tuesday, which is about what is needed to exceed 1.4 million, is a big lift. 

The early vote advantage for Republicans is also manifesting itself in red states. 

In Florida:

Also, this.

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In North Carolina:

In Texas: 

In Ohio:

Republicans surging in early voting combined with Democrats underperforming is also happening in Blue States. Take New Jersey, for example:

In Oregon: 

In Virginia, this poll dropped over the weekend amidst the orgasmic response from regime media to the Selzer poll. 

It goes without saying that if Trump wins Virginia, Tuesday night will be a rout. Finally, in New Hampshire, even NBC political analyst extraordinaire Steve Kornacki has caught up with what I've been saying for months - watch the Granite State. That's your canary in the coal mine. 

Early turnout is happening in formerly very red pockets of blue states, like my backyard of Orange County, California. 

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Market research and public opinion polling as an industry is projected to earn just shy of $21 billion dollars by the end of this year. You'd think that with that kind of cash thrown at the problem, we'd actually know something definitive about how things will go, instead of getting 13.5-point swings in uncontested states. But then, you'd be wrong. How wrong? Possibly Nate Cohn wrong, the chief polling poobah at the New York Times. 

Terrific. They admit they could very well be just as off as they were in 2020, because they can't find enough Republicans willing to answer the phone and take their surveys. So they're guessing. If that's the case, the average miss by all of these polling outfits collectively was 4.6%. That means Trump wins the popular margin by the same margin Joe Biden won four years ago, and the Electoral College will be a landslide. 

Or, you could be this pollster, who came out with a number, decided over the weekend that he didn't like it, so he just went back, changed the ideological makeup, hit recalculate, and reissued a more favorable result for Kamala Harris. 

Lastly, you could be NBC - we're tired of this. It's tied. 

Of course, you'll have the good decency to ignore the fact that a month ago, they had Harris up five. 

There. If you have had a case of the vapors because of this poll, that survey, or whatever the hell that Selzer thing was out of Iowa, hopefully, this put things into a little more perspective. And that doesn't even mention the confidential memo out of Tony Fabrizio, Donald Trump's pollster, trying to calm the waters ahead of Election Day. 

But in reality, all of this data is totally irrelevant if you don't do your part and vote. If you've early voted, good on you. I'm a same day voter type of guy. I like the process. I'm old school that way. Me and the Missus will be at our local polling station when it opens up at 7am on Tuesday. I'll be ecstatic if there is a long line. 

And one more piece of advice. All of the polling analysis I just mentioned above, most of it is backed up by facts or dispelled by facts. When it comes to Tuesday afternoon, you're going to be inundated by early exit polls, which are nothing short of Satan's gossip chain. The bi-annual reminder must be issued. Do not listen to exit polls on Tuesday, regardless of what they say. That will be regime media's final attempt at a head game to turn you away from the polls at the last minute. Vote! And then if you're the praying type, do that, too. We'll all learn soon enough who was right and who was wrong. 

By the way, this just in.

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Those wouldn't be Trump voters. Those would be Antifa types for muh democracy, obviously. 

Tags: DONALD TRUMP KAMALA HARRIS POLLING 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

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