The midterm polls suck, and they might be right – if you believe them, we could be headed for anything from a blue tsunami to a blue wave to a blue trickle. But that’s a big if. To avoid that conclusion, you have to believe that the majority of polls, which are undeniably showing most of our key Senate candidates losing, are inaccurate. Now, this is where it gets tricky, because we want to believe in a massive polling miss. We want to believe that the polls are skewed Dem-ward. We want to believe that there are Republicans out there who aren’t being surveyed by these polls who are going to show up on election day and pull our bacon out of the fire. The power of wanting is potent, and it can blind you. It can make you stupid. It can make you miss the obvious. And that danger exists there. Those polls could be substantially correct, in which case we’re going to have a very bad November 3rd.
And yet…
Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.
We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.
If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.
Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.
Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.
No, you can’t take all that to the bank. No, it’s not scientific, but are the polls scientific? Well, the pollsters apply statistical analysis to creating them – at least sometimes. It’s very clear that a significant number of the polls, if not all of them, to some extent have an endgame in mind. Some of them are obviously ops. But others are effectively ops. Remember, you don’t just count up numbers with polls. You don’t call X number of people and do the breakdown of who said what. You have to weight it by who you think will show up at the ballot box. So, what does the voter profile look like for this election? Does it look like 2006? 2012? 2018? 2020? 2022? 2024? Who knows? The science of polling involves statistics, regression, and all sorts of math that makes your head hurt. But there’s an art too. That art manifests as an educated guess.
And yes, if you notice, before we discussed polling science, I talked about what goes into what are effectively educated guesses. Polls are not free from considering outside factors. Polls require that even an honest pollster make his best guess about what the breakdown of voters is going to look like. Maybe all the Democrats are going to come out and none of the Republicans. Maybe vice versa. Maybe they’re going to come out even – as Steve Kornacki pointed out just the other day, party enthusiasm is now even at 71 percent. Well, if everybody’s going to show up, that kind of changes things, doesn’t it?
Now here’s the big question, and it’s a tricky one because it once again requires us to believe something we want to believe. When presented with something that you want to believe, you should be extra suspicious. Confirmation bias is real. Even the best of us is not immune to it. So, let’s proceed with caution. We’ve got Democrats out there paying tens of millions of dollars to fool us; there’s no need for us to do it to ourselves for free.
Here’s the question – are pollsters getting a good sample of actual Republicans? In other words, are Republicans either not being called or refusing to participate in polls to such an extent that they are being undercounted? Pollsters will tell you that it’s very hard to poll Republicans. Why? We don’t trust pollsters. We don’t trust the regime media. We don’t trust anybody. But is that significant enough to substantially change the bad polling we’ve seen? I guess that depends on how many Republicans refuse to play with the pollsters.
Now, to measure that, or at least give ourselves some idea of it, I conducted a poll on X, which is about as scientific as voodoo. Still, here it is:
“This is a question for conservative Republicans who intend to vote… Do you respond to polls?”
Results from 2,479 respondents:
Never: 81%
Sometimes (1%-50%): 13%
Usually (51%-99%): 3%
Always: 3%
Well, that result is pretty substantial. If my informal poll is even remotely accurate, the vast majority of the time, Republicans won’t participate in formal polling. And of course, one thing that isn’t captured by this poll is what kind of Republicans respond sometimes, usually, or always. This is important because, by showing up, they’re doing a lot of the work of measuring Republican intentions. Are they substantially different from Republicans who never respond? They might well be since the responders might feel more comfortable dealing with the establishment and are therefore probably less hardcore.
But is this significant? Well, it’s obviously not a scientific survey. It is an X poll, so it’s going to be answered by the kind of people who follow me. These are majority conservative folks with a large America First contingent, though the comments include a lot of idiotic bots who thought they were clever by pointing out the irony of people answering an X poll by a friendly commentator regarding answering formal institutional polls by entities we largely consider to be enemies, as if those two things are identical.
The comments that do matter include the many people who say they’ve never been polled at all. Some of us get outreach all the time – I’m one of the “Never” folks, and I get hit up every couple of days by text or call. So, this exercise seems to indicate that, among relatively conservative folks, there is a huge resistance to participating in formal surveys. Does this result translate to “normal” conservatives, the kind who are never on X? I don’t know, but I suspect it does.
So, where do we stand? Well, science alone won’t give us the answer. We’ve got to use the art part, the intuition based on experience and other evidence that helps us evaluate the scenario. What does it all tell us?
I know what it tells me. I don’t think the polls are accurate. I think there is a significant undercount of conservatives because conservatives refuse to participate in the polling process, and because many of the other factors lead me to believe that Republicans are not going to skip voting or vote for the Democrat enemy. Neither makes sense to me, though I realize I may be completely wrong. But my gut, for what it’s worth, feels like the Democrats have peaked. This is when Republicans start coming home. By the time the election rolls around, they will be ready to roll out and vote red. Is this all just wishful thinking? You bet it is. I certainly wish my hypothesis is true. And right now, I think it is.
But don’t rely on that. Get everybody you know and get out there and vote Republican up and down the ballot. We need to nuke the socialists from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.
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