Quit Plotzing About Polls, Poopsie! It's Just Republican Pollsters Flooding The Zone For Trump!
It's 2022 all over again!
About a month ago, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg predicted that Team Trump would be flooding the zone with a bunch of Trump-humping polls before the election, showing Treasontits McGee, certified loser, felon, rapist, and con man, actually winning. And whaddaya know, Rosenberg is psychic like a Dionne Warwick phone friend, and that is exactly what is happening right now! Republican poll zone-flooding has happened before, remember the red wave of 2022 that wasn’t? Or all the times Trump paid to rig polls before, including making Michael Cohen pay for one, which he did with an old Brazilian boxing glove? Those were fun times!
Rosenberg identifies 27 polls that are Republican or from right-aligned entities that nobody should trust:
American Greatness, Daily Mail, co/efficent, Cygnal, Echelon, Emerson, Fabrizio, Fox News, Insider Advantage, McLaughlin, Mitchell Communications, Napolitan Institute, Noble Predictive, On Message, Orbital Digital, Public Opinion Strategies, Quantus, Rasmussen, Redfield & Wilton, Remington, RMG, SoCal Data, The Telegraph, Trafalgar, TIPP, Victory Insights, Wall Street Journal.
And of course ignore the Peter Thiel-backed Polymarket, or doofy Twitter polls that exist only to show how very right-leaning the entire platform has become.
How do you cook up a biased poll? One recipe is to substitute “registered voters” with “likely voters.” And then you can make the “likely voters” whoever you want! Such as what a recent American Greatness/TIPP survey did in Pennsylvania: Out of 1,079 registered voters, they decided that only 12 from Philadelphia are “likely voters.” What turns a registered voter into a likely voter? That’s pollsters’ choice! Ta-da, now Trump is winning by a point! Then, those biased polls get chucked in to create averages, and Democrats crap a book on how to freak.
Hey, check out these messages from American Muckrackers showing Rasmussen chitchatting with the Trump campaign! (Scroll down to “Part 1.”) Smells like an illegal in-kind campaign contribution! As did when Elmo threw Ken Klippenstein off of his web site for posting a link to that document where JD Vance calls Trump some variation of a racist asshole 87,000 times. But who are we to say, we digress, and we are not the IRS or FEC.
Why would Republicans want to pretend they’re winning when they’re losing? Couldn’t that backfire terribly, and get Democrats even more energized than they already are? A few reasons!
One is to force Democrats to spend money in the wrong places. If it looks like some Democratic Senate candidate in, say, Ohio, has no prayer of winning, then it would make sense to put that ad money somewhere with swingier potential, like Pennsylvania, instead. Another major reason is so that Trump and Republicans can whine and say somebody cheated when they lose.
Want to plotz less? Check out this internal Republican polling memo that Politico somehow got their paws on, showing Trump losing Pennsylvania and Michigan, and Ted Cruz barely hanging on by a single point. Also if you look at actual early votes by party, Democrats are already ahead by almost a million votes. Check out Pennsylvania, where Democrats have returned about 292,000 ballots so far, to the Republicans’ 104k. Or Wisconsin, where they’ve returned twice as many. Of course that could just mean that Democrats are the type to take Taylor Swift’s advice and plan ahead, and there will be a mad dash to the polls by Republicans on November 5.
OR, these fake polls are a symptom of a party that’s about to lose bigly, and knows it, and is girding itself against the ketchup flying at the wall! Our Dionne Warwick sense is saying it is the second one.
OT: Haha. Some doofus is over on Pervert Justice asking why trans men aren't shattering records in men's sports, as if trans women are shattering all the records in women's sports. WHOOPS.
Insufficient use of "plotz" is destroying American political reporting. I, for one, am glad to submit to our plotzing Wonkette overlords.