You Are Being Manipulated By Bad-Faith Pollsters
Take a look at how things stand when the polls are un-fucked
It’s a deeply unhealthy habit of mine in late October every four years: Consume election polling like a lifelong cigarette smoker promising himself he’ll have just one more pack, one more ciggy, one more drag and be done with the filthy habit forever.
That I know for certain that I’m not alone probably makes the habit worse. I have once again joined fellow Americans fretting about falling into the fascist abyss should a vengeful would-be dictator slither back into power in reading and analyzing every last poll that crawls across my various timelines. I have well meaning folks online begging me to stop, to take care of myself. I nod and I tell them I need one final drag, a drag to make my lungs burn good and long. Then I'm done.
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It only struck me last week how badly the polling informational space has been intentionally and systematically poisoned by bad actors who want to depress Democratic turnout, create a reality in which it’s OK to vote for the end of representative democracy, and convince Trump’s hardcore following that he cannot lose this election; it can only be stolen from him. I have consumed unknown hundreds of poll results – both standalone and aggregate – that mean to distort my view of the Harris-Trump matchup, which, as I’ve argued with Patrick Daugherty, might not be all that close if you don’t get bogged down in the reams of data pouring into your addled brain.
This is hardly new. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, we saw Senate races that had not been all that close suddenly tighten in the final week before Election Day. John Fetterman, a former Bad Faith Times favorite, suddenly and without explanation found himself one point down in aggregated polling after leading by 4-6 points over the election’s final month. So what happened?
A flood of last-minute right-wing polls happened. These polls, considered neutral and trustworthy by the Polling Industrial Complex, painted Fetterman as a slight underdog with no significant change in the contours of his race against a surgically-altered fake TV doctor. These unreliable polls goosed the election betting markets in Dr. Oz's favor and made Fetterman's campaign look like something of a lost cause, the same way Elon Musk's appearance alongside Trump at a Pennsylvania rally (Elon recently discovered the "state of Pennsylvania") has designed to boost Trump in the betting market. The effort was successful, and may have been part of an elaborate "pump and dump scheme" to alter discourse around the general election.
Fetterman, as you may remember, easily won, beating Dr. Oz by 5 points. It was never a tight race, though you would have thought it was if you, like me, had been plugged into the polling machine designed to make races look more interesting than they are.
The Pissing And Shitting Will Continue Until Morale Improves
I know. You're chronically online these days and you are pissing and/or shitting yourself with every new data point meant to convince you Trump and his extraordinarily unpopular ultra-right movement are somehow inevitable. My advice would be to put on that diaper, baby, and keep reading.
First, what do we mean when we say there are dozens of bad-faith polling operations manipulating the public? Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo presented this explanation.
There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.
Now for your weekly allotment of Bad Faith Times copium. Except it’s not really copium, but rather an un-fucked view of how the general election is most likely playing out in these final days before another toe-to-toe fight against all-out fascist rule.
Cutting through the right wing’s manipulative polling bullshit is important both in our role as properly informed citizens of the United States and for our general well being. Who wants to walk around all day wondering how Trump went from 45 percent to 52 percent over a three-day period with nothing happening but the Big Boy droning on about Arnold Palmer’s gigantic hog? I certainly don’t.
Nevin Michael, a polling aggregator who was the most accurate prognosticator in both 2020 and 2022, has done this for us, filtering out low-quality, hyper-partisan polling outfits that have been classified as good-faith actors by Nate Silver and his ilk. As journalist Mark Chadbourn said on BlueSky, these polls – which often come out in quick succession after a real poll shows bad news for Republicans – are merely “GOP fantasy vehicles.”
Whereas every mainstream pollster has deemed this race a “coin flip” since Kamala Harris entered the fray in July, Michael’s data – which, again, throws out pollsters who create conservative dream scenarios – shows Harris as the hands-on favorite to win the presidency (for more insight into Michael's polling process, see this Threads account).
Michael points out that The Washington Post's newest round of polling – a welcomed set of data point after a week of right-wing nonsense polling – is far more favorable to Harris than one would think if one is (stupidly?) following these things closely.
The Post, Michael said, "has consistently been one of the most GOP friendly of the independent pollsters this cycle and their new battleground survey" still has Harris winning 292 electoral votes and taking Georgia by four points among likely voters and six points among registered voters. "The fact that she’s leading nationally, with slight but consistent leads in the most vital battlegrounds (Blue Wall), makes it particularly suspect how certain forecasters wanna find any excuse possible to designate Trump the slight favorite they’re making all the same mistakes they did in 2022."
It was in 2022 that the Polling Industrial Complex, with almost no dissent, predicted a wipeout election for Democrats, similar to the electoral bloodbath we saw in the first midterm election of the Obama era in 2010. There was no red wave in 2022. There was even a smallish blue wave. Maybe this shouldn't be shocking considering the 2018 midterms were the most lopsided (for Democrats) of the modern era and very few prognosticators had predicted such an outcome.
It's not just Michael sounding the alarm on how partisan Republican polling outfits are skewing the public's view of the 2024 race. Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and polling analyst, said the right wing – as they did in 2022 – is waging an informational war in the polling space and weaponizing the very data that's supposed to bring clarity to voters.
“[Republicans'] campaign to game the polling averages and make it appear like Trump is winning—when he isn't—escalated in [the] last few days," Rosenberg said last week, adding that "red wave" pollsters from 2022 have once again "flooded the zone" with shitty polling data. It's a matter of public record, after all, that Trump and his cronies pay pollsters for favorable polls that are then dumped all over the internet and quickly become reality.
Rosenberg over the past month has identified 25 polling organizations involved in crafting a 2024 red wave in the voting public's consciousness. These organizations blasted out a whopping 25 presidential polls last week alone, which were then shared widely in Elon Musk's fascist fiefdom and made into reality for millions of Americans who both love and loathe Trump. Twelve of 15 Pennsylvania polls were generated by right-wing polling organizations last week. Hence, we have huge swaths of the population sure that Trump will glide to victory in the Keystone State.
I saw many of these polls and was left with overwhelming nausea. That's on me. I'm dumb. Just one more drag though.
The "ferocity of effort" involved in making "it look like Trump is winning clearly means they don't think he is," Rosenberg said.
The steady drumbeat of stories about Black and Latino voters flocking to Trump for reasons that are never fully explained could very well be part of this effort. We saw the same stories in the lead up to the 2022 midterms, and the POC-voting-Republican narrative did not come to fruition. Not even close.
One last bit of copium for your week: A mere 45 percent of Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the GOP primaries are committed to backing Trump in November. Thirty-six percent of Haley voters say they're voting for Harris. To these untrained eyes, that seems important.
Let's keep Watching The Damn Game. It's the only way to avoid the manipulation of bad-faith polling actors and remain halfway sane.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social
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