I used to believe that this dubious movement was merely an attempt by a left-wing activist media to create or maintain a preference cascade — the idea being that, because we as voters like to back a winner, were the legacy media and their favorite polling arms able to convince us that their “fortified” candidate was the inevitable victor, they could sway a not insubstantial number of us to move in their favor. Additionally, such polls aim to dispirit potential opposition voters, the goal being to keep those voters at home, because a trip to the polling place is an exercise in futility, and nobody wants to waste time fighting the inevitable.

To accomplish these goals, captured media and their pollsters would selectively present polling data so that the results would show exactly what they wanted shown, even if this meant pollsters would have to bracket a number of important internals that belied their ostensible conclusions.

Now, however, I believe something even more sinister is at play.