Regardless of who finally wins the US Presidential election, one thing is for sure, the polls got it wrong. Again! Or, did they?
In an interview with John Anderson, the former deputy Prime Minister of Australia, Victor Davis Hanson argued that it was part of a deliberate false projection—in cahoots with Big-Tech—to present an overwhelming negative narrative and so prevent conservatives from being more involved?
Davis Hanson is a renowned historian, conservative pundit, classicist, military historian, columnist, and best-selling author. But while no conspiracy theorist, Hanson puts forth the argument for pollsters being politically motivated as follows:
These pollsters are products of these elite classes and in our country, they’re situated between San Diego and Seattle and Boston and Washington. And they claim, as they did with Brexit, that it was an inadvertent error. After 2016 in American they said, ‘Mea Culpa’, we didn’t understand the red state voter, we didn’t go to Youngstown, Ohio. We never went to Bakersfield, California. Teach us.
But now we’re learning that, that only lasted enough—six weeks—just to deflect the criticism against them. And the criticism against them, they ignored from the right, but they did take seriously the left. The left said to them, “You gave us hope. We didn’t even worry about the election. Hillary was ahead in every state by seven or eight.’ And what they basically said was, you didn’t prepare us so that we could take preparations. So, we gave them a pass.
And the narrative was here and I think in Brexit too—and maybe in your country it was—well, the pollsters just are in an echo chamber, they’re blinkered, they don’t know how to go out to a guy in Perth and talk to him. They don’t know how to go out in rural England, and a small hamlet and say, ‘What are you feeling about mass immigration or globalisation, we want to get your views. We want to know how to count you.’
So, we took them at their word. And now we’re seeing at this election they had plenty of warning about the stealth Trump voter we had The Democracy Institute, the inside vantage poll, the Trafalgar poll. They all pretty much called the election, just as it was – neck and neck, with worries about massive voting fraud. In fact, they said that!
And everybody said, ‘You know, this isn’t The New York Times. Come on, this isn’t The Washington Post. They have no cachet. So, we were giving them one chance and now what’s happened is people are suggesting that, if you have a pollster, and they tell you Brexit is going to lose—there’s just no way—or your Prime Minister can’t win re-election, or our President can’t, and they continue to do that, there is a large number of people that, that affects…
So, if I’m a rural store owner in Wisconsin and I pick up the ABC news that night or pick up The Washington Post and it says Donald Trump is going to lose by 17 points, I say to myself, “Oh my God, I thought we had a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t write that hundred-dollar cheque to the campaign. Does it really matter if I have to go out and vote? I was going to vote in person, I don’t think I can, it’s kind of too late now. I was going to sign up at the local Republican Party and take people to the poll…I don’t think it’s worth it.’
And that’s what pollsters have become. They’re agents of the media and they suppress the vote and it’s very ironic because we’re always lectured on the evils of voter suppression. But that, and then the media telling you every single day, that Hunter Biden did nothing wrong. That the Biden family has never made a penny off China. Then when you say, ‘This laptop…these emails…these participants in these texts, they’ve all said the opposite’. They say, don’t listen to them, and if you put them on your platform we’re going to censor it. If you have an account on Facebook it’s going to be frozen.
So, there was an effort by Big-Tech and Big-Media and Big-Pollsters to massage a result that they felt would reflect more in the globalized, international community’s agenda and they didn’t have the numbers to perpetuate that goal, they didn’t. It was clear that when you looked at rallies when you looked at signs when you looked at levels of enthusiasm when you looked at more disinterested polls, they just couldn’t do it. And so, I think the Trump people were a little arrogant and a little complacent, they said, ‘Do your worst to us and we’re going to do our best and you’re going to come up short, just like you did last time.’
So, there was a sense in the Trump community that we were invincible. You didn’t have to worry about cheating because we would have such a huge turnout. I mean, how could you cheat if you have a 400,000-vote advantage in Pennsylvania with only a million or two out. How can you lose a 250,000 vote with 90% of the votes in, in Wisconsin? So, that kind of attitude I think really hurt the Trump cause. It was a reversal of 2016 when Trump’s people were really eager and desperate to show that they had the majority and Hillary was complacent, and this time I think the left learned their lessons and they said, ‘You know, we’re going to outspend them two-to-one. Michael Bloomberg spent 150 million on Senate races. We’re going to use all of Big-Tech and we’re going to not apologize for it—and they don’t—and we’re going to use these pollsters in a new and innovative way as suppressionists.
And then we’re in places like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Phoenix, we’re going to make staff with these procedures and protocols with bureaucrats who are not going to follow the state law. And we are going to present them with a fait accompli, and then after a week people will be so used to President Biden they’ll be demoralised and they won’t pursue this as whiners in the Supreme Court writ or something.
Hanson makes a compelling case for the politicisation of polling. Many people have rightly rejected putting their faith in polls. But it’s also time to question the motivations of those also doing the polling. For maybe they’re not as stupid as they might seem…
