Elections have always been about turnout – if your voters don’t show up, you lose. It’s pretty simple, actually. Yet that bit of “wisdom” will be treated as though it is a revelation that just revealed itself to pundits as they mutter it on panel shows.
But turnout is where everything related to modern politics and polling falls absolutely to hell, as there are groups of people who either can’t be reached by pollsters or do not want to be, who will play an outsized role in who will win this November.
On the right, MAGA voters have proven nearly impossible for pollsters to track. Most polls are conducted in association with some left-wing media outlet – NBC News, ABC, CNN, etc. – that most MAGA voters not only don't believe, but they don’t trust them to the point that they won’t even talk with them.
Statistical sampling is very important in polling; you can’t call every member of a minority group while running a poll, so you have to determine what part of the whole you’re calling is needed to represent each configuration of people. When you’re dealing with polls, you’re usually looking at 500 or so people, either nationally or statewide. That’s a very small sample, so your pool of voters has to be as representative of reality as possible to have a shot at accuracy.
The problem for pollsters is MAGA has no interest in any interaction with the political establishment beyond telling them off or mooning them. They don’t answer calls from people not in their contact lists or unknown numbers. And who would respond to a text message from a random number asking you to respond for a call or click a link?
You can’t take someone’s temperature if they’re not going to let you anywhere near them with a thermometer, and MAGA isn’t interested.
Pollsters end up either getting a very small sample of MAGA and trying to extrapolate from there – making a square yard of fabric try to cover three square yards, for example – or missing any MAGA sample completely. Neither option will give anything near an accurate temperature.
On the left, the mutant radicals only communicate through the dark web; they don’t even call their parents (which the parents likely prefer). They’re a paranoid bunch who believe they’re important enough for the government to dedicate full departments to tracking their every move, so they won’t give “the man” anything to go on.
There really is nothing more paranoid than a committed leftist antifa goon. They won’t show up to work, but they will show up to riot. The question is whether or not they’ll show up to vote.
In the past, these people voted for the Green Party or the Communist Party USA, and were nothing more than the reason elections were won 52.7 percent to 47.1 percent – they are the personification of the missing .2 percent. They have been rounding error voters who have now taken hold of a chunk of the Democrat Party. They may have held their noses and voted for Democrats in the past – ironic, considering they are who people need to literally hold their nose to be around.
Now, however, they’re a possibly deal-breaking percentage of the electorate for Democrats. People with a history of either not voting or voting for fringe parties and candidates are very difficult to count in statistical samples. Do they count as reliable voters or get discounted as people who might get stoned and sleep through the whole thing? Add to that the question of whether or not whatever pending charges many of them are facing are adjudicated by election day, and you begin to see the difficulty in gauging how to count them accurately.
This election is going to be like Christmas when you were a kid – we’re not going to have any idea what we’re going to get until we open the gifts or get the results. All the shaking of the boxes, the careful trying to figure out what is in them by the size and weight isn’t going to do any good, as socks can be put in any size container.
Pollsters and pundits will insist they have insights or guesses beyond wild ones, but they do not. It’s a matter of whether or not MAGA will show up at President Trump’s request, rather than to vote for him personally, and just how motivated and large the fringe that has all Democrats terrified to criticize ends up really being.
They’re questions we’ll have the answers to in one month. Make sure you vote, because leftists will do everything possible to make sure the mutants do.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and is the author of the book Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and the host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
