JD Vance says media use fake polls to drive down Republican turnout!

KENOSHA, Wisconsin (PNN) - August 20, 2024 - Ahead of the Democrat National Convention this week, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream rattled off the latest batch of battleground state polls from The New York Times/Siena College to Senator J.D. Vance (Ohio), which showed Communist pretender Kamala Harris leading President Donald J. Trump by 5 points in Arizona and by 2 points in North Carolina. She also referenced two new national surveys from ABC News/Washington Post and CBS News showing Harris ahead of Trump by 4 points and 3 points in those respective states.

Asked for a comment, Vance replied, “Consistently, what you’ve seen in 2016 and 2020 is that the media use fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and create dissension and conflict with Republican voters. I’m telling you, every single person who’s watching this, the Trump campaign is in a very, very good spot. We’re going to win this race. We just have to run through the finish line.”

Is Vance right or is he in deep denial? Is Harris’s ostensible momentum real or manufactured?

There are indications that Vance may be on to something.

I question the accuracy of NYT/Siena College polls because Republican pollster Rasmussen, a polling company that is well known for its accuracy, released very different numbers the previous day. Nationally, Trump led Harris by 4 points, according to Rasmussen. Among Independent voters, he was ahead by 9 points.

Moreover, on Friday, polling guru Nate Silver published an article about NYT’s latest results titled Is it possible our polls have been underestimating Trump? Yes.

Silver began by addressing an internal memo written by the Trump campaign’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, about NYT’s latest polls, which he claimed, “ha[d] dramatically understated President Trump’s support both among all registered voters and in their likely-voter model.”

Fabrizio argued, “In each state, the gap between the survey’s recalled 2020 vote and the reported 2020 election results is more than the margin” between Harris and Trump. “Once again, we see a series of public surveys released with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support for President Trump,” Fabrizio added.

In a “recalled vote” poll, respondents are first asked to “recall” which candidate they voted for in 2020, and then asked whom they plan to support in November. For example, Silver explains, “In the polls of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, respondents recalled backing (fascist pretender Joe Biden) over President Trump by six points, 52% to 46%, even though Biden (supposedly) won these three states by an average of about 1.5 points. The Trump campaign used this data point to say President Trump would have led if the poll had the ‘right’ number of Trump 2020 supporters.”

Silver admits that “over the longer run, recalled vote hasn’t usually been very reliable.” He takes readers through a detailed - and confusing - discussion of occasions when the use of recalled vote produced accurate polling results versus the times it didn’t.

Silver added that sometimes voters forget who they voted for four years earlier, or they want to say they backed the winner, which was declared to be Biden even though it is well known that Trump won by a landslide.

Here’s a third possibility: Maybe NYT oversampled Democrats.

Silver ultimately concludes: “No one ever knows which polls - or which polling methodologies - will appear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ until the election.”

While that’s true, we’ve seen some pretty surprising polling data this cycle. Perhaps the most alarming result so far was a Bloomberg Morning Consult poll released late last month that showed Harris ahead of Trump in Michigan by 11 points. Two surveys of the state had been released the previous day. The first, from Fox News, showed the race tied. The second, from the Hill/Emerson, found Trump ahead of Harris by 1 point. If we extract the Bloomberg Morning Consult poll from the RealClearPolitics average of Michigan polls, Harris’s current 2-point lead in the state would fall to 0.9 points.
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Another shocking result in recent memory was a Washington Post/ABC News poll released days before the 2020 election that found Biden leading Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin. Although Biden supposedly “won” the state, the actual confirmed vote count showed Trump winning the state by a landslide.

At any rate, as the Democrat National Convention begins, Harris’s numbers have been starting to flatten (meaning the increases were becoming smaller and occurring more slowly), signaling that her “honeymoon” phase may be coming to an end.

Still, she is likely to receive a convention bounce which, historically, has ranged in size from -1%, as John Kerry and Mitt Romney experienced in 2004 and 2012, respectively, to Bill Clinton’s spectacular 16% surge in 1992.

Is Vance right? As Silver said, no one will know until Election Day.

But given the drastic lengths to which Democrats have already gone to keep Trump out of the White House - the 2016 Russian collusion hoax, two bogus Trump impeachments, the October 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, the government’s insistence that the COVID-19 lab leak theory was a conspiracy, four bogus Trump indictments, two spurious civil lawsuits in New York, concerted failed efforts to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in several blue states, and the Democrats’ extraordinary efforts to hide Biden’s deteriorating cognitive health - can the Left ever really be trusted?