How Did They Get It So Wrong?

 

Out here in “fly over” country, we joke about how weather forecasters and economists continue to be paid, even though they are wrong more often than they are right.  Most real Americans have to be, at least competent at what they are doing if they expect to be paid. We need to add pollsters to this elite group of folks who continue to be paid no matter how wrong they continue to be.

Once again, the political pollsters totally misread the intentions of the American voters. Right up until the vote counts started to be reported, the pollsters and pundits were telling us that the race was “too close to call”. Yet, for all their expertise, all their education, all their high-priced data, the election was not close.

As I write this on Thursday, President Trum holds a commanding 69 electoral vote lead over Harris and is ahead in the nation-wide popular vote by more that 5 million votes. This is an electoral land slide. How did the pollsters miss it?

Maybe a better question might be why did they miss it?

To be just, I think that I need to point out that many of Mr. Trump’s supporters are highly suspicious of governments and of the news media, including pollsters. There is a very real possibility that many Trump supporters might not have been honest with pollsters. Given this anti-authority tendency among Patriots, Conservatives, and Libertarians, it is possible that pollsters might never get a truly accurate picture as long as the news media remains so virulently “progressive”.

But our distrust in pollsters is not the only, nor the major cause for the dismal polling results. The fundaments of modern polling, coupled with deeply ingrained prejudices, and their sycophantic need for approval from the ruling elite has all but destroyed both their ability to take meaningful polls and their credibility.

The nature of their work almost necessitates that pollsters reside in the power centers of the country. They become neighbors with the Ruling Class and the peer pressure that comes with it. The pollsters want to fit in, they want to belong, and so they approach their polling with a preconceived bias to appease their neighbors.

This bias has its base in the fact that that pollsters are all college “educated”. Most of us know that colleges are no longer centers of higher education but are propaganda camps for the Ruling Class. Coming out of these propaganda camps, those people who go into polling begin with a pro-establishment, pro-Ruling Class bias. Their abilities to objectively gauge public opinion is skewed from the beginning.

It is also human nature to want to please “the boss”, to make sure that the guy footing the bill is pleased with the results. As every major news organization supports the Democratic Party and the Ruling Class, any poll conducted on behalf of any news organization is almost sure to be biased toward the Democrats.

If I, or anyone else with even a modicum of common sense, were commissioned to poll the residents of New Bethlehem on an issue, we would begin by finding out how many residents we would need to poll to get a representative sample and we’d speak with that many people at random. We would have an objective representation of what the people in New Bethlehem think of that issue.

At random. Therein lies the rub.

Pollsters no longer ask at random. Over the past 30 years identity politics has become the norm among the Ruling Class and the progressives. Every group of people must be broken down into a series of generally accepted demographic categories – male, female, white, black, college educated, etc. and so forth. The samples are not random, they are prescribed by the progressive idea that these arbitrary “identity groups” are monolithic voting blocs, that all college educated white men vote alike, all blue-collar workers vote alike, all women vote alike. We know that they do not, but this flawed concept has become one of the foundations of political polling. And we all know that if the foundation is flawed the end product will be flawed.

There is another, darker, more sinister reason the polling has been so dreadful over the past 20 years. It is possible that the pollsters, being part of the news media, may have moved from gauging public opinion to trying to influence public opinion. As wrong as all of the polls were this year, I am inclined to think that the pollsters were trying to discourage Trump voters and encourage Harris voters and because they were not accurately gauging sentiment in the country, they failed to influence voters.

Republican, Conservative, Libertarian, and Patriots must view polls and pollsters from here on with the skepticism that they treat mainstream news. They simply cannot be trusted any longer – for whatever reason. Like the news media, the pollsters have proven themselves not to be worthy of our trust or support. And like the tradition news media, it will take years of hard work for them to regain our trust.