Americans Won, Pollsters Lost
Americans Won, Pollsters Lost
The media’s lies shatter against the courage of a nation.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Can pollsters learn to code?
Four years after utterly discrediting their entire profession, the same hacks and bean counters did it again. Instead of counting people, they counted political agendas.
And the polls will never be the same again.
“Trump Can Still Win, But The Polls Would Have To Be Off By Way More Than In 2016,” Nate Silver headlined a widely shared article at the tail end of last month. Spoiler alert: they were.
As both candidates deliver their own pre-victory speeches and the networks resume the ritual badgering of the man who once again shattered their assumptions, this was not a mistake. The people and the polls have permanently parted ways. People may be less likely to tell pollsters the honest truth in a politically dangerous time, but it’s the job of pollsters to determine that.
The polls were not measuring the nation, but the agenda of the media and the questioners.
Once again the media set out to create the perception of an inevitable Democrat, inventing their leads, boosting their popularity, mixing up the statistical secret sauce, and spicing it with lies.
The same plan and the same lies that hadn’t worked for them in 2016 was unleashed again.
While the numbers indicating doom and gloom were being delivered, a 97-mile car rally for President Trump raced across Arizona. Tens of thousands gathered to cheer his determination in Pennsylvania with a sound like thunder. These Americans, by the countless thousands, stood up to be counted where no pollster was looking and where no pollster wanted to see.
Going into Election Day, there were two Americas. One was the America we saw in the media, a place where the Republican base had soured on President Trump, and a new coalition of suburban and elderly former Republicans were uniting with the Democrat’s minority base.
This was true enough. You just had to step through the looking glass.
President Trump’s base drew together elderly white voters and Latinos to stop Biden cold in Florida. Meanwhile the working class voters the media had been telling us had soured on Trump amidst the trade war and the economic downturn came out for him stronger than ever.
Their roar toppled Ohio and is forcing Democrats in Philly to forge new ballots all night along.
Republicans weren’t the only victims of the night of long faces and bad polls.
Democrats wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a plan to crack Republican strongholds in Texas, South Carolina and Georgia, which they could have been using to win the election.
Stacey Abrams will go down in history for not only losing her own race in 2018, but convincing Democrats to burn a fortune in the South as a consolation prize for losing out on being Biden’s VP.
But con artists are ultimately their own biggest victims. Even though the campaigns had more legitimate polls at their disposal, the fantasy league numbers the media was serving up sold the Democrat donor class on the idea they were in the middle of a blue wave sweeping the nation. Now the wave has rolled on and they can see that it consisted of angry blue resistance members.
In 2018, a midterm election, that was enough to shake up the political landscape. But in 2020, President Trump may have lost out on some of the white men who had been his base, but gained support from minority voters who were tired of the lockdowns and the lies. A nation in crisis was not going to vote for a feeble leader who leads from behind in his basement.
Only the media in its own basements, real and virtual, ever thought that was a good idea.
Election Day’s results may not have finalized the election but they shattered a number of lies, not just about geography and demographics. Americans were not nearly as worried about the virus as the media. Nor are they as fragile and sensitive as the polls had been telling us.
The electorate that came out to vote in huge numbers is strong and resilient. And what they want, above all else, is a chance to put that resilience to work and to feed their families.
Biden and the Democrats, guided by bad polls, went all in on masks and lockdowns.
It was the wrong move.
They went all in on critical race theory and Black Lives Matter, and Latino voters deserted them.
Every Democrat disaster, like the disasters in the Soviet Union, began with an ideology putting its utopian theories over the blunt realities of human nature. And the polls created a hall of mirrors, an echo chamber, in which everything that the Democrat elites believed was true.
Nationwide.
The Founding Fathers understood that elections were the ultimate reality check. America has elections because our leaders work for the people. And there are only two ways to ensure that: revolutions and elections. We used to have elections as an alternative to revolutions. Now elections have become our revolutions. Voting is the musketry and grapeshot that shakes an establishment’s grip on power and reminds it that it is mortal, flawed, and not in charge.
For four years, the media tells Americans who they are and what they believe. And at least once in four years, Americans get to answer back, not on the censored platforms of Big Tech, but with every man and woman finding their own secret voice and speaking not their truth, but the truth.
The establishment began fighting this election after the last one. It prepped censorship, unrolled an economic disaster, and spent the entire cycle frantically lying to potential voters. The lies failed, but where they failed, voter tampering may succeed. The lies didn’t convince Americans that there was no point in voting because a senescent Democrat hack was the inevitable choice.
But they can still serve as the cover-up for the massive voter fraud operating now underway.
Had the lies worked, the voter fraud would have seemed plausible. But as the night of Election Day approached, so many conservatives took to the streets, rallied, and showed their faces. The crowds at the rallies predicted the massive turnout by working class voters for Trump. And now the voter fraud is much less plausible. That doesn’t mean that it won’t happen anyway.
As night approaches day, as ballots are taken away or counted, the real struggle begins.
2020 was never going to be a clean election. The same radicals and corrupt establishment interests that spied on political opponents and tried to lock them up are not going to stop at Tammany Hall’s oldest habit of raising the dead and finding as many ballots as it takes.
What Election Day did was shatter the lies that would have made the fraud seem plausible.
Republicans stormed the polls. They waited on in line, hour after hour, even as the media made its bad calls, because it wasn’t just about voting, it was about making the country see them.
We live in the age of lies. The only way to tell the truth is to stand up and be counted.
After a season of lies, a nation stood up to be counted, and the polls proved to be as fake as Soviet agriculture reports. The Potemkin villages that the media had built up for four years fell.
The election isn’t over, but the stakes are clearer than ever. In a long twilight struggle between truth and lies, the lies lost, and the cynical power grab behind them is more obvious than ever.
The lies went to the polls, but the truth won.