Here’s why I don’t trust the polls, besides my decades of experience watching politics. It’s because when a weird phone number comes up on my phone, even one that doesn’t say “Spam Risk,” I give it some major side-eye. Now, I usually have to answer unknown numbers without a spam risk alert because I get lots of calls from people not already in my contact list — the booker for Geebo and the Boner’s Morning Zoo on KDUM radio in Bumtouch, Idaho, and that sort of thing. After all, that’s my business. And I always answer with a grunt because I don’t want AI taking my voice and using it to tell Irina that I’m trapped in Nigeria and she has to send $700 to get me freed from captivity. But if there’s a slight pause, or I hear a lot of voices in the background from the boiler room in Bangladesh, I hang up. Yet, occasionally, a normal voice comes on, and if they say, “I’m from Something Something Polling,” I am out of there.
I don’t know about you, but if you’re statistically like every single one of my conservative friends, you never ever ever ever talk to pollsters.
That’s my personal poll of my friends and acquaintances, a poll with one single question: “Do you ever answer polls?” and the answer is invariably “No,” “Nope,” or “Are you kidding?”
Conservatives just don’t like any of the institutions that have screwed us over the years, and we respond with reasonable hostility. For example, I get calls from the regime media every once in a while asking for a comment, and I tell them flat out, “I don’t talk to the regime media.” I did that to the New York Times not long ago, and up-talking Wellesley grad reportrix on the other end of the line got big mad. Oh well. It just goes to show that we’re done with institutions. They hate us. Hollywood. The media. The pollsters. And we hate them back.
If you look at the pollsters for this November, and if you believe them, things look fairly dire for the GOP and, therefore, America. But if you dig a little deeper, you see a lot of the big-picture polls show that blue areas are really, really, really running up the score for the Democrats, while red areas are much closer but are still red. And some of the results are just flat-out insane. The idea that James Talarico has the lead in Texas doesn’t work for me. I’m going to be in Texas soon in the run-up to the election, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve completely misjudged things, but it’s not likely. There are a lot of libs in Texas because there are a lot of Texans. Still, the idea that a majority of Texans are going to vote for the blasphemous sexually ambiguous creeper who wants to ban guns and hates meat and who looks like he shouldn’t be allowed within 1,000 feet of a kindergarten just doesn’t work.
And last week, the polling didn’t work big-time. 9/11 fanboy Abdul El-Sayed (D-Hamas) was supposed to beat bizarre caricature Haley Stevens (D-Van Down By The River) for the Democrat Senate nomination in Michigan by double digits. He won by barely a digit. That’s a polling miss on par with the infamous 2024 Ann Selzer Iowa poll that had Kamala Harris beating Donald Trump by three and ended up missing by something like 17 points. There have been lots of misses in polling, and they almost always seem to miss in the direction of favoring Democrats. Some of the polls are so obviously rigged they probably begin with a land acknowledgment.
Now, you might call me cynical, or you might call me a guy who’s been watching this stuff happen for four decades, but it seems to me that some of these pollsters put their soft, girlish thumbs on the scale to help Democrats. The effect is obvious. High polling numbers 90 days out for Democrats are designed both to energize the Democrats, to the extent they’re not energized already at the thought of imposing an Islamo-socialist sharia San Francisco pinko utopia upon America, and to demoralize us. That’s what they’re trying to do: “Oh, Ken Paxton can’t possibly win. Oh, we’re doomed in Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. Oh, Susan Collins totally going to lose to the second-cousin banger.” And the message to us patriotic voters is clear: “you better just sit this one out. No donations. No door knocking. Just gobble black pills by the handful.”
So, why would we participate in an op against ourselves? Well, we don’t. We hang up. We know it’s a waste of our time because they’re going to report what they want to report. That’s especially true early in the campaign season. No one’s going to hold them accountable for the numbers they give now. Around October, polling starts to get a little more accurate because they want to at least be close on election day, but who cares what happens in August? Now is the season where the pollsters are free to cater to their customers. Remember, pollsters get paid, and the guy who pays them expects results. A lot of people say, “I just want to hear the truth,” but no one wants to hear the truth. People want to hear what they want to hear. And you should be cynical enough to apply that standard to me here, but I’m not afraid of that because I’m right. My guess is that you don’t talk to pollsters because you have better things to do with your time. Let me know if I’m wrong in the comments, but I’m not wrong. And if I am, you can give me grief about it on the Gulf of America Cruise a week after the election happens.
If you’re America First, you are definitely Pollster Last, but you know who loves to answer polls? Lonely, creepy shut-in libs buzzing on Chardonnay and Xanax. They are always thrilled to have the chance to share their stupid views, whether on their Facebook page or on the phone with a stranger, since they aren’t talking to their kids anymore because their kids voted for Trump. Remember, there’s a social reward for being a leftist. There’s a social sanction for being conservative, one that we have all experienced. If some pollster asks you whether you like Donald Trump, a positive answer is going to draw disapproval, whether it’s manifested or not, or even articulated in English or not, since they are probably calling from a call center in Bombay (I don’t do Mumbai or any of that geographic revisionist crap).
That’s why we often choose not to share our politics with strangers. It’s not that we’re afraid to argue with idiots. It’s just that we have better things to do than to argue with idiots.
There are some pollsters who are trying to get it right. Those are the ones where our opting out of participating really affects things since they’re not purely making stuff up. But even they can’t be purely objective. Polling is an art, not a science. To conduct an effective poll, you have to make an effective estimate of what the voter model will be on Election Day on November 3, 2026 (which is coincidentally the day my action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” comes out). If you have a bad voter model, you have a bad poll.
It’s hard to do right. Nobody knows exactly who’s going to vote and who isn’t or in what percentages. You have to guess. It may be an educated guess, but it’s a guess. You can look at historical trends and demographic reports and try to figure it out, but at some point, you’re going to have to go with your gut. You then build your model, and then you put the actual evidence from your phone calls into it to come out with your numbers. And you can see the problem — if you don’t have an accurate voter model, you’re not going to have an accurate poll. And in August, you’re probably not going to have an accurate voter model.
Now, combine that with the active bias of pollsters and their interest in having their polls not merely record the consequences of the trends but to facilitate the trends themselves, and factor in the fact that the polls have been off in the primaries, and you have to conclude that nobody knows anything. It is certainly reasonable to expect, based on historical trends and issues like Iran and the economy, that the Republicans might be facing some headwinds. But there’s no macro election like in a presidential year. It’s 435 individual House races, plus 33 or 34 individual Senate races. Every one of them is different, and that’s far too many for every pollster to be an expert on.
This isn’t a plea to ignore the polls or to not take this election seriously. Nearly half of Americans were stupid enough to vote for Kamala Harris, so we have a lot of idiots out there who can do a lot of damage if we, the normal people, don’t come out in force and vote for people who aren’t insane communists who blame those $20 burritos on the Jews.
Just don’t let the pollsters get you down. You can’t control what they tell you, but you can control one vital thing — your own actions and your own vote. Write checks to favored candidates. Go out and knock on doors for favored candidates. Vote for patriotic candidates who don’t want to eradicate America or ban Thanksgiving. And keep hanging up on those irritating pollsters.
BIG NEWS! Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!
🛳️ Ahoy! Join us on our own Odyssey as we set sail on the conservative Gulf of America Cruise. It is not just a bunch of obsolete losers guzzling Zima on the Lido Deck! Larry O’Connor, Scott Jennings, and I are sailing the Caribbean this November on an epic voyage of discovery and owning the libs. All aboard this Salem/Townhall event! Sign up now!
My super-secret email is Kurt.schlichter@townhall.com
