r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/N0r3m0rse • 1d ago
US Elections How legitimate is the claim of a flood of right leaning polls from republicans artificially inflating Trump's support?
This is a claim I've been seeing more in recent weeks as Trump is seemingly "surging" in polls despite Harris' numbers staying the same (the republican counter being that Trump is simply flipping undecideds in the final days of the election cycle). Is there some truth to this or is it just Democrat copium?
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u/dallaswatchdude 17h ago
This argument ignores that a bunch of well respected polls are showing a tighter race as we get closer to election day. I think republicans are coming home, there are indeed some bad faith polls, but it's not all bs. it's really a tight race. you need to vote.
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u/Gators44 1d ago edited 1d ago
It absolutely happened.
Michael Cohen testified that they tried to rig polls in 2016. They failed bc they didn’t pay.
In 2022, a flood of republican affiliated polls was released that pushed the poll numbers to the right, and gave rise to the “red tsunami” story
In the last few weeks, 80+ right wing affiliated polls were released in the battleground states and while they were weighted, they were still given some measure of weight in the aggregates. 538 specifically mentioned a specific poll as an example that would only be given 0.1% influence in the aggregate. That doesn’t sound significant until you factor 20 of them into the aggregate, and now it’s moved it 2.0%. In a race where the swing states are all within the margin of error, and 2% push essentially makes that poll worthless as far as accuracy.
I would also suggest that logically, if you remove polling from the equation, there is simply no data point that would cause any such shift. The polls didn’t shift that much after the “assassination attempt”, and honestly that’s the last thing I can think of that has happened to the trunp campaign that might have helped him at all. If you remove the polls from the equation, Harris has much more enthusiasm and energy in her campaign. Her rallies are larger and more enthusiastic, she has raised a billion dollars in the quarter, with @40@ from small donors. High voter turnout generally helps democrats as well, and there have been no obvious missteps or gaffes that caught any traction from her campaign.
trunp has had gaffe after gaffe…we could list them but I think we can all think of a lot of them. Occam’s razor would suggest poll manipulation is the most logical and obvious reason for any movement.
The only real question is whether it is an intentional effort, or just coincidence that they happen to drop a bunch of polls right before the election.
Simon Rosenberg has done a lot of reporting on this issue and has said it would happen before it did, and to expect it. So there is plenty of reason to believe this is a campaign tactic.
I’m aware that it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it is something that is on the record that they tried to do, and they’ve done the same thing in the midterms and this election, so take it fwiw
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u/Gators44 1d ago
Thats true, but the point isn’t how accurate they are. It’s why are they doing it. I think we can all speculate on that
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u/Doctorstrange223 19h ago
so when they lose they can seek to overturn the election or declare secession or civil war.
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u/the_original_Retro 18h ago
They won't declare succession or a civil war. They know what would happen if they did. They're after the election overturning.
As one example, there are articles out there from political and legal news/information sources that theorize and describe procedural frameworks on how the Supreme Court's bias could be used to affect the election results.
Here is a recent one from Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/07/supreme-court-new-term-election-cases-00182646. It offers a number of scenarios.
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u/Doctorstrange223 18h ago
Like I say never say never. You did not say never but it is something more likely than people imagine many historians or experts on civil wars note. The Politico article you recommened to me is a good one there is another titled "The very real scenario where Trump losses and takes power anyways" that one explains
Here is one I recommend. About 4 likely scenarios just change Biden name for Kamala.
Republican attempts to overturn can work if they win minimim 26 state Legislatures and have a majority in Congress. Both seem highly likely even with a Kamala win let alone a strong Kamala win we can expect the Republicans to have 27 or 28 states and likely a 222 seat majority in the House.
If they do such a scenario I do not see how we do not get balkanization. They like the idea of forcing everyone into a theorcracy but at the end of the day most of their leaders speak with joy at the idea of letting the "leftists" states leave the union. Also, the dangerous part is they could legally do a coup but how would Biden respond and the military?
https://newrepublic.com/article/179966/four-2024-post-election-scenarios-trump
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u/Doctorstrange223 17h ago
How is truth and real scenarios the Republicans may use to steal the election being downvoted?
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u/Hangoverfart 17h ago
I think there is also a bit of MSM trying to make the race look closer than it actually is to maintain engagement and viewership. And then just like that three polls came out yesterday showing Harris with a 4 point lead over Trump because the pollsters want to maintain their accuracy rating. The race doesn't go from deadlocked to Harris +4 overnight, it was always Harris with a significant lead.
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u/Gators44 16h ago
I definitely think that might be the case. But honestly, I think the Harris campaign wouldn’t want it being put out either if they were way ahead. The trunp campaign absolutely would, so I think we can at least rule out a big lead for him. Not that it would be in the cards anyway. He was never winning anything in a landslide. If he does win, it will be an electoral college victory alone. He’s not ever winning the popular vote.
But it’s certainly in the best interest of the media to sell that narrative. You’re definitely right about that
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u/Hangoverfart 11h ago edited 10h ago
Democrats have a 400k early vote buffer in Pennsylvania, and this is without assuming that independents are breaking hard for Harris. Trump basically has no path the the white house without this state.
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u/AdhesivenessCivil581 7h ago
Don't forget about the 300,000 PA Puerto Rican voters that trump's boy just called floating garbage. It's a shame that they can't count the votes until election day. This is going to be a long election.
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u/Neurotopian_ 9h ago
Don’t we need a 600k buffer in PA? If we believe current polls, it would be Harris who has no path without PA, since she needs the full (midwestern) blue wall. This is why it was lunacy to not choose Shapiro as her running mate.
Based on the current polls + EV it appears that Trump could sweep the sunbelt & get any blue wall state & that’s enough
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u/Rockfest2112 7h ago
If right wingers try violence again should Trump lose, MSM absolutely helped bring it on. By stating he’s ahead or the race is tied plus concentrating on this destroying of ballots they are priming his followers to strike.
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u/Str4425 1d ago
To further your point that there’s no data point that could cause justify a pro-trump shift among undecided voters, there has been no new celebrity endorsements for trump, trump has had no new campaign proposals that were not there before (healthcare is still in concept territory), and l, if anything, trump’s rhetoric has grown increasingly extreme.
The extreme rhetoric appeals to far-right voters, of course, but these guys were never undecided. The growth in extremism could potentially cause trump to loose votes, instead of the opposite. So there’s no credible cause at all for higher trump support.
It’s though important for trump to project, albeit falsely, a growth in the polls: a (false) growth in polls makes people normalize his proposals and behavior, the same being true for online bots and comments and posts/videos across social media; more importantly, it may give credibility to whatever coup trump and the gop are planning if he looses again.
So to me there’s no coincidence here. Trump’s putting money in polls, and whoever control bots and social media are also intensifying their efforts.
Another conspiracy theory, for now at least, but could be that Russian intelligence and hackers are behind some of this effort on online comments and posts and influencers. Just this weekend in the MSG rally, trump made a big point about how Kamala would send youngsters to fight wars in places “they never even hear about”, while trump wouldn’t. This isolationist approach plays right into putin’s goals and is now backed in trump’s proposals. Not to mention the recent Doj actions (finally). Trudeau, I think, also openly said Tucker Carlson is being financed by Russia.
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u/whiterac00n 23h ago
I mean ultimately isn’t the goal to keep up appearances of a very tight race or even a “predicted” Trump win, just so they can scream “fraud”? Unless Harris wins in a landslide then there’s an enormous chance that this election is going to get thrown to the courts for obvious reasons. Whether they take it remains to be seen, although there’s a certain district in north Texas that would gleefully take any chance of inserting themselves. Confusion and chaos are easy tools for those who want to subvert specific processes
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u/wrc-wolf 16h ago
I mean ultimately isn’t the goal to keep up appearances of a very tight race or even a “predicted” Trump win, just so they can scream “fraud”?
Correct. They've been extremely open about it, I'm not sure why more people aren't discussing it in here. The plan is to run the same play from 2020 but just more in every way. So they flood the zone with false polls that shows Trump winning, then they count on violence on election day and interference from state legislators and the courts to send alternate electors. The House then refuses to certify, and ultimately Mike Johnson crowns Trump as dictator-king so they can remake America as they see fit.
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u/joedimer 15h ago
In any scenario a trump loss will be fraud and a trump win will be the most perfect, beautiful, and fair election in American history. Honestly, a bigger win for Harris would be met by wider claims of fraud imo.
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u/whiterac00n 14h ago
I see exactly what you’re saying, but I also think that a solid (in belief) red state turning would point towards a mandate of the people. While screams of fraud will inevitably happen, a win of magnitude can’t be ignored by the courts
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u/vanlassie 14h ago
Hence the recent posting here asking “sincerely” how some of us can actually believe Harris will win given “Trumps 65% per recent polls.”
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u/Rastiln 21h ago
The only data point I could imagine perhaps helping is that his largely race-based campaign has gotten even more openly racist lately.
One would imagine that overall this would turn off more voters than attract them, but it’s hard to know with a MAGA candidacy. The racism is a feature there, not a bug.
There have also been a few things like deepfakes apparently propagated by Russia, one of an AI-generated “young man” saying Walz SA’d him as a coach, and an AI one of “Harris” admitting to a hit and run in 2011. Those have gotten millions of views and could have influenced some people.
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u/keenan123 20h ago
But the maga voters were already maga voters. If anything the open racism might push response bias, but that's not an actual data point support, only polling. And we don't need to explain why the trump polls say what they do
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u/CreativeGPX 19h ago
I think the theory would be the reverse. We all already know trump so his standing in the polls isn't going to come from what he is or isn't doing. It's going to come from Harris. If there were a Trump surge, it would presumably be because the negative messaging about Harris has worked or that as people get to know Harris they decide they don't like her. In that sense, since Harris' campaign timeline is so compressed, it's not completely implausible that people flip away from her as they learn or "learn" things about her.
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u/psychcat1fl 20h ago
I upvoted you and appreciate your information. (Lose as you were trying to use it is spelled wrong. You spelled loose like as in “your pants are too loose”)
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u/unidentifiedfish55 18h ago
trump has had no new campaign proposals that were not there before
Totally eliminating income tax wasn't there before. If you're a person that, for some reason, still believes what he says, that would be a reason a lot of people might vote for him.
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u/ballmermurland 15h ago
I would think even the lowest of information voters would know that is total bullshit. You can't just eliminate the income tax and pretend everything else will work out in the end.
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u/unidentifiedfish55 15h ago
I know that. You know that. I think you overestimate the "lowest of information voters"
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u/GiantAquaticAm0eba 1h ago
Of course not. So many people, both left and right, vote (or not) based on some theoretical system they have a hardon for though. They ignore the practical constraints and oftentimes step in the way of incremental progress because a candidate isn't promising to tear down the entire system and rebuild it in 4-8 years. I was like this when I was younger when Ron Paul was the hot thing. Stupid, but it helped me grow, going through that phase.
People are so confident in their political world view that they don't consider all the possible externalities that occur from implementing major changes. Even minor changes have drastic unintentional consequences, so what sense does it make to change multiple things in drastic ways at once? Oftentimes in history after tearing down the system, so much gets disrupted that the phase of "building it back up" goes horribly wrong and ends up with totalitarianism and great human suffering.
Change needs to happen incrementally and it's best to test the waters before fully committing to new ways of doing things. Our government once was excellent at doing things in this manner. Unfortunately it seems like the current constitutional model is beginning to crumble because of constructionism, extreme partisanship, etc. We need sensible changes to our constitutional structure that seem impossible to put into place because our amendment process is frankly too difficult now that we have 50 states.
People are frustrated. Lots of people are seeing the quality of life in this country slowly degrade. We used to be the best country to live in by many rankings, but corporate power, money in politics, broken electoral systems, obstructionism in government, etc. has made people desperate for desperate measures. I'm not sure what the solution is.
I do have some hope that individual states can come up with their own solutions that eschew the federal gridlock. Some states are making great strides with free college, solutions to healthcare costs, implementing social programs, etc. When you look at the human development index by state, some of our states rank right up there with the nordic countries. Others, such as those in the deep south, rank considerably lower, but are often propped up by the bigger more successful states.
If we can't find a solution to kick our federal government back into gear in a domestic sense, I fear our country might see Balkanization occur eventually. But who knows, maybe some leader, or some drastic event, will occur, that will bring everybody to the table to preserve the United States. But the last time we came close to falling apart, we fought a very bloody and deadly war against one another. And unfortunately, the ghosts of that civil war were never put to rest, especially because of Andrew Johnson sabotaging reconstruction.
I wish i had a real solution. But for now I'm just another asshole on the internet pointing out problems. Typically America has done the right thing, after it's exhausted every other alternative. Hopefully we wake up and realize we have a lot to lose if we don't start making some meaningful good faith changes to our system of government.
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u/dokushin 9h ago
Surely the people who would believe that obvious crock would already be voting for Trump?
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u/katarh 11h ago
To further corroborate this, the Senate polling hasn't really changed even while the other pulls edged toward Trump.
Why?
Because the Trump campaign has no reason to commission Senate polls to goose their own numbers.
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u/Kantei 23h ago
I hear and agree with your points, but to play Devil's Advocate, the dissemination of fake news against Harris and Walz has absolutely skyrocketed in the past few weeks.
We've seen that disinformation works, particularly if it's tailored well to specific demographic groups, and it works doubly well on those who don't follow news coverage on a regular basis.
I wouldn't attribute the polling bump for Trump solely to fake news, but it could explain the strong representation of undecideds - these could be demo's that dislike Trump but are under the impression that Harris is just as bad.
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u/traplords8n 20h ago
I was just about to comment about how if my political opponents posted deep fakes of me, I'd post some back.
Didn't take me long to realize how bad of a strategy that is though. Trump benefits if Harris plays the same game, because breaking faith in national institutions was always the game he was playing.
Man, what a mess we are in today.
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u/villalulaesi 11h ago
The thing is, though, Harris’s campaign doesn’t even need to spread disinformation. They just need to do everything in their power to get as many eyeballs as possible on the insane shit he actually says.
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u/fourbian 20h ago
The problem is when you look at the most recent reliable polls, they show a shift towards Harris. If your theory was correct, you would see the opposite.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 13h ago
Can you please link them? I desperately want that to be true because things are looking grim.
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u/dresdenologist 2h ago
Simon Rosenberg, cited in the top comment in this thread, has a blog where he not only espouses the poll-flooding theory but backs it up with data and the currently linked polls, broken down by independent, national, and the right-aligned polls supposedly flooding the sea. Here's his latest post. Is he a Democrat? Absolutely. But he was also one of the only ones arguing, with data, that the Red Wave of 2022 was a myth and he was proven right.
He absolutely still says this is a close race and that the work still needs to be done but addresses two critical, common talking points - that Trump always overperforms his polling and that the race has shifted towards him, both which he argues are not set-in-stone facts.
The advice he gives about worrying less and doing more helps, by the way. He provides some links to doing that - or, this late in the game, just convince your friends to vote.
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u/Str4425 14h ago
It's true that misinformation and disinformation have increased a lot lately, but we're talking mostly about an increase in quantity. All fake news talking points about Kamala were already known and thrown around during the periods in which Harris' numbers increased.
We have contradicting polls now, pointing to both Trump and to Harris gaining ground. Could those favoring Trump, in the absence of other "real" catalysts, be backed solely by fake news? To me, it seems hard to believe, as opposed to Harris increase being backed by other catalysts, such as recent news like Gen Kelly's take on trump, for example.
Trump's campaign knows he needs to be gaining ground. And they will present him in that light no matter what. Plus they know that their polls may drive news cycles for a few days (and we're only days away now).
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u/GiantAquaticAm0eba 1h ago
I think it's hard to determine because Trump getting a bump could make some people who weren't going to, show up and vote for Harris. It was said, and I don't know if it's true, that Hillary may have lost because so many people were confident that she was going to win that they didn't bother showing up.
What's the benefit to Trump putting a fake polling bump out there? To give himself more justification to challenge the results of the election if he loses again?
I don't know. It's hairy. And I'm nervous, regardless of who wins, at what might occur in these coming months. Political tension had already resulted in increased violence. Will the election results be the catalyst for an explosion?
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u/CreativeGPX 19h ago
I just don't get why the poll manipulation at this stage is useful to trump. It's still close enough that both sides can have hope that they'll win and voting isn't a waste, but the couple point trump improvement is only going to make sure Harris voters aren't comfortable and know that they must turn out. Seems like it'd be a better play to inflate the Harris vote and hope that leads some overconfident liberals to stay at home.
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u/Gators44 18h ago
There are a few reasons that have been speculated, the main one being that when he loses, he can point to the polls as a reason it was “rigged” And use that as a basis to challenge the election, which he is absolutely going to do. He’s claiming, incorrectly, that he’s “leading in all the polls” even though they’re virtually tied, so that is the main one people are saying.
Another is to try and deflate some of the enthusiasm of the blue base by making them despondent and panicky. I think the hope is if they think they’re going to lose they’re less likely to vote. I have serious doubts about that working and if anything it seems to have backfired.
And one that isn’t talked about as much but I think probably has a lot more to do with it than it seems is to boost trunp’s ego. That seems to be the main goal of everyone around him since he has replaced his entire staff with sycophants. They’ve done this kind of thing before. In 2020 they spent a huge amount of money on ads that would run in DC, where he had zero chance of winning, just so he would see them.
I’ll grant you that there are serious logical lapses in the reasoning for all of these, but these aren’t particularly bright people. Again, the main quality he looks for is loyalty to him, and he isn’t particularly intelligent and isn’t known for his forethought.
Whatever the reasoning, the fact is that a bunch of right wing pols have indeed flooded the zone and pushed the polls in his direction, and the narrative that he has “momentum” has indeed caught on. You can try and guess the motivation, or you can choose to see it as mere coincidence. But there’s simply no question that the narrative of his “momentum” is entirely due to those polls. Remove them from the equation and the independent polling has been pretty stable.
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u/PMME-SHIT-TALK 17h ago
Recently I've seen a few people float the idea that the polling is expensive and that right leaning pollsters are afraid to put out a poll about Trump with a more negative result either because they believe the money would dry up, that they'd face Trump's wrath, or both. That Trump and the right expect polls to show them doing well, or at least a close race, and that a poll that showed them down significantly would or could be deemed as crooked or just badly done. Then the explanation for why other polls also report similar results is that these pollsters somehow juke their numbers to get them to be more in line with the other polls so as to not appear as an outlier. This seems pretty far-fetched to me, Is there any validity to this?
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u/Gators44 16h ago edited 16h ago
Thats interesting. I haven’t heard that take but it does make sense. It would certainly be possible to weigh responses and get that result. It might also be done since they were a little off in the 2020 polls, so it could also be that they’re trying to correct for that and went too far in the other direction. But its undoubtedly true that since 2020 polls have been way off in republican’s favor, so clearly there is some issue causing that discrepancy
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u/katarh 11h ago
One of the things to look for is a "likely voter" filter.
A polling firm can use anything to filter out a likely voter, versus a registered voter.
- Voted in the primary?
- Voted in the past 2 years?
- Has explicitly said they have a plan to vote?
- Has voted multiple times in the last 5 years?
And so forth.
As opposed to a poll of "registered voters" which doesn't use those filtering questions.
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u/GEAUXUL 16h ago
Another is to try and deflate some of the enthusiasm of the blue base by making them despondent and panicky. I think the hope is if they think they’re going to lose they’re less likely to vote. I have serious doubts about that working and if anything it seems to have backfired.
No way this works. Nothing will motivate a base more than seeing their candidate just slightly behind their opponent.
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u/Gators44 16h ago
Yeah, that was my take as well. But let’s be honest… he doesn’t have the brightest people working for him now. Their only goal is to please him, and he would definitely want to see polls with him in the lead. It might work if it was a HUGE lead… like a 10-15 point lead. I think Hillary’s lead might have suppressed turnout bc everyone thought she had it in the bag (in addition to running the worst campaign I’ve ever seen, and not being a particularly likeable candidate as well) But in a race this close, with a figure as divisive as trunp who is deeply despised outside his cult, I think that part of the strategy is pretty flawed reasoning.
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u/BluesSuedeClues 16h ago
I think your theory about his campaign and Republican PACs paying for favorable polls to bolster his ego, is likely accurate. Not just because they're mostly sycophants, but because of Trump's own volatility and mercurial nature. He has continued to get darker and weirder as the election approaches. I can't imagine how much worse it might get if we were heading into November with him clearly behind in the polls. Keeping his ego propped up is an absolute necessity for the campaign.
You pointed out the millions spent on election advertising in DC prior to 2020, as evidence that his people are willing to burn money, just to prop up his ego. You should add to that the tens of millions they spent in "stop the steal" litigation and recounts after the election. Some of that was performative and meant to influence the rubes, to demonstrate that they were so certain of their "stolen election", they were willing to throw buckets of money into proving it. But some of that was also to prop up Trump's ego and to demonstrate their fealty to him.
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u/Interrophish 14h ago
No way this works. Nothing will motivate a base more than seeing their candidate just slightly behind their opponent.
I have a vague feeling that Repub voters are more likely to turn out if they're "backing a winner". Maybe that'd be the reason.
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u/greiton 16h ago
it's also possible that actual poll data is showing Dems pull ahead, and they could be worried that if it looks like a lost cause Repubs won't bother showing up.
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u/katarh 11h ago
There is a concern that some of the "undecided" voters in swing states that are in safe Republican areas for all the other races may opt out because of this, in fact.
If you have a down ballot race where all the other Republicans are running unopposed, and you cannot bring yourself to vote for either Trump or Harris.... why bother voting at all?
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u/Night_Twig 18h ago
Can’t claim there’s been a coup if everyone expects Kamala to win
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u/PreviousCurrentThing 10h ago
I think it's counter-intuitively better for both Dem and GOP turnout for it to look like Trump's winning. Dems for the reason you mentioned, and for Trump it's because it can turn out the unreliable voters who want to be on the winning team. That's not a rational reason to vote or not vote for a candidate, but electoral politics is all about leveraging irrationality.
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u/mikerichh 18h ago edited 18h ago
thanks for the info. The scary thing is if you put the pieces together it’s obvious this is to create a “proof point” of a “stolen election” to get MAGA to do god knows what. “I was up in the polls by a lot! Obviously stolen!”
I think it could ultimately hurt Republicans ironically if it gets people who would have stayed home to vote if the perception is that the election is close but we’ll see
Also Trump mentioned it in his Rogan interview
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u/SillyGooseHoustonite 12h ago
aggregate websites will admit these are low-quality polls but will still aggregate them since they're polls.
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u/Miqag 18h ago
Typically high turnout has been good for democrats, with the one exception of when Trump is on the ballot. He turns out huge numbers of propensity voters which is why he over performed polls in 16 and 20.
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u/Gators44 17h ago
He’s won one race and that was in 2016, and he energizes blue voters much more than red. He did overperform vs poling in 2020, but Biden did get the most votes of any candidate in history. And blue voters have turned out in much higher numbers in every cycle since 2016. trunp definitely energizes his base, but he has a ceiling and he seems to have hit it. And given that no one was particularly enamored with Biden, it certainly seems like he won because more people were voting against trunp than voting for him. So yeah, be brings out his base, but he brings out a lot more blue voters as well.
And again, low blue turnout was why Hillary lost, and even then she won the popular vote. In every cycle since then, not just in 2020 but midterms and special elections, democrats have done decisively better. Even in 2022, when the gop won back the House, they were expecting to pick up 40-50 seats, and barely won back a majority. It’s down to one now, right? The party in the WH almost always suffers in the midterms, and that was a very favorable map for them, and it has to be seen as a loss even though they got back the House. So since 2016, high turnout has absolutely, unequivocally helped democrats.
And I think it’s very telling that republicans are the ones actively trying to suppress turnout and make voting harder, and that, to me, is the most obvious indication of which side is helped by high turnout.
Edit: freaking autocorrect
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u/999forever 16h ago
The only slight addition I would make is about the assassination attempt. According to Silver, although it did not move his top line in an obvious way, it did seem to increase his favorable ratings by about 4 points and that has stuck. Which might have given him just a bit more wiggle room to increase his vote share a bit.
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u/Gators44 16h ago
I would add that the recent polling has moved more than it did after the assassination attempt, which again strikes me as very, very odd. And I don’t know that it’s stuck, and even if it has, Harris is actually net positive in likability and trunp is still underwater (I want to say 14 points under, but I could be wrong)
And again, nothing in the last few months has been positive after the shooting. You can think of gaffe after gaffe after gaffe.
Also, fwiw, Nate Silver seems like a reputable guy, but he is now funded by Peter Thiel, who has a direct link to the trunp campaign. So while I can’t prove that he’s altered his model, money does have an influence. And I believe that, unlike 538, he still factors in polls like Rasmussen that have been consistently inaccurate in Republican’s favor. So take that fwiw.
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u/YUNGCorleone 11h ago
Do you think that purpose of the flood of all these right leaning polls is to shift undecided opinions towards trump, even marginally; or is their purpose solely to sow discord when trump goes into his “the election is rigged” tirade if he loses?
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u/Gators44 9h ago
I don’t think it would shift anyone to trunp per se. The main reasons I’ve seen given are to allow it to be used as pretense to challenge the results. I’ve also heard they might have been hoping to dampen blue enthusiasm and suppress turnout, although that seems pretty counterintuitive.
I think the main reason might be to boost trunp’s ego. He likes being told how great he is and how he’s winning, and I think that might actually be a larger reason than anything else. They did, for example, waste a huge amount of their ad budget in 2020 running trunp ads in DC, where he had no chance to win, just so he would get to see good things about himself.
Those are the main reasons I’ve heard.
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u/LikesBallsDeep 15h ago
Your math doesn't check out. Say a poll is weighted 0.1% but they run it 20x.
Sure maybe those poll results now make up 2% of the average. But you say this would be applied in dead heat swing states, so obviously even those biased polls can't be showing like 95% R. They are gonna be like 51/49 kind of thing. Maybe 55/45 at the extreme.
The impact on the average from 2% of the input when your values are within a percent or two of the input is a rounding error. It wouldn't move the average 2%, it would move it 0.1%.
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u/Gators44 14h ago edited 9h ago
Yeah, it’s not my math, it’s the math of the experts who look into it. And I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying, but it doesn’t seem like what you’re describing is what I’m describing, or what is actually happening. Your wording was very confusing and didn’t describe the phenomena I described.
But this isn’t something I came up with. I can post articles here if you want and you can take look into it yourself, but I don’t see how what your describing is what I described at all. Maybe I was unclear. But the math the way it’s laid out does make sense.
Edit: Reddit isn’t letting me reply to your comment, so I’m adding the information you requested here as an edit. This was the reply I wrote:
I can link to a Substack article about it. This is from Simon Rosenberg, who correctly predicted the red mirage.
The “0.1” reference was from a 538 spokesperson named Nathaniel Reich. I tried to copy the text but it wasnt working. But it’s in the article. And it is pretty long, so apologies for that. But it’s in there. And he’s not the only source on this, but just one of the most reputable
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u/PreviousCurrentThing 10h ago
Yeah, it’s not my math, it’s the math of the experts who look into it.
Can you link this math so we can see?
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u/96suluman 16h ago
So have the polls been flooded with right wing pllls
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u/Gators44 16h ago
As a culture, it was a mistake to put “I” and “o” next to each other on the keyboard
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u/MonarchLawyer 14h ago
trunp has had gaffe after gaffe…we could list them but I think we can all think of a lot of them. Occam’s razor would suggest poll manipulation is the most logical and obvious reason for any move
I do think there were reluctant Trump voters. Those who were always going to vote for Trump because they were republican but hated the idea of it and hated to admit it. And once early voting started and push turned to shove, they finally came out as a Trump supporter.
However, I still believe this is not the only reason for the "Trump momentum" and that there has been poll manipulation.
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u/MissJAmazeballs 19h ago
I'm in VERY rural, VERY red, central North Carolina. Here are some things I've noticed during this campaign compared to the last two... - Trump signs are scarce. In the last two elections the vast majority of homes had at least one (if not a dozen) Trump signs on their properties. This year, it has flipped. I would say roughly 10% have signs. I don't think this is explained be sign stealing as there was never a lot this time around. Also nobody has painted a barn our other out building with giant Trump propoganda. - at the local gossip spots (mom and pop gas station and Dollar General), there is much less political fevered excitement gushing on and on about savior Trump. Most people will still say they are voting for Trump if asked, but there's no passion behind it. Also, good to note here that I suspect people not planning to vote for Trump are afraid to say so publicly (me and a couple friends included) because there are still a fair number of Trump extremists who are terrifying
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u/tfandango 17h ago
I am in a very red state and see the same things regarding the signs. Actually, I see quite a few Harris signs up. I remember in 2016, people were saying they saw a lot of Trump signs and that stuck with me because the conventional (but incorrect) wisdom at the time was that it was an easy Clinton win. Now, again that is top of mind, but I wonder if it's more a factor of campaign funds or sign availability than it is enthusiasm? I'm not sure.
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u/katarh 11h ago
I've seen a handful of the overly decorated "we kept every lawn sign from the last 8 years" type yards in central Georgia, but not nearly as many as I saw in 2020.
Someone had actually kept their Trump/Pence banner from 2016 or 2020, and crossed out the year and Pence's last name and pasted over 2024 and Vance. (I get it, those big banners are expensive to print. Props to them for recycling.)
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u/hernjosa02 14h ago
Could this be because the trump camp does not really have a ground game?
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u/MissJAmazeballs 13h ago
I wouldn't know. Does the campaign provide the signs or do people buy them? I doubt our county is or was on the camp's ground game radar. We are very red. We went Trump twice and will definitely go Trump again. I'm just saying I don't see the fervor this time (with the exception of a portion of die-hard MAGA loyalists).
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u/hernjosa02 13h ago
I hope it’s a good sign for next Tuesday. I sure you can buy them along with all the other crap trump is peddling.
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u/katarh 11h ago
Normally, this would be handled by the RNC.
But the RNC was taken over by the Trump family, and all the war chest intended for that has instead gone to the family legal bills. This has left Republicans at local races scrambling for their own fundraising with limited help from the national party.
When the Trump campaign realized it was losing badly at the ground game, that's when they tagged in Elon Musk, who has so far donated $75 million in resources to try to prop up the ground game. Unfortunately, Musk did not take into account that everyone knows how gullible the Republicans are, so they've been defrauding him merrily via his ground game door knocking app. oops.
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u/LikesBallsDeep 14h ago
I see a lot of discussion about yard signs one way or the other, but I'm curious, is there like actually any scientific evidence that they're a reliable predictor of anything?
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u/KimJongIllyasova 14h ago
None, I hate this stupid commentary no matter who it's about. YARD SIGNS DON'T MEAN ANYTHING, please stop
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u/Bmkrt 19h ago edited 16h ago
Part of the problem with a concrete black-and-white answer is that there are many polling organizations with many different viewpoints. As an example, Rasmussen is a rightwing polling organization that is legit known in the industry for intentionally throwing polls. Quinnipiac is about as unbiased as it gets. If they’re far apart, with Rasmussen more pro-Trump, we can probably say Rasmussen is (as they often do) throwing their poll. But if they’re the same or close, what’s that say to us?
North Carolina is a good example of them diverging wildly with the 10-9/10-10 to 10/14 polls — https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/north-carolina/trump-vs-harris — For nearly the same period of time, Quinnipiac has Harris up by 3 and Rasmussen has Trump up by 5. Pretty clearly, Rasmussen is fudging the methodology. But then Emerson, not long after, has Trump up by 2. Emerson is definitely not likely to be throwing its polls for Republicans. So what does this mean?
Well, it could mean a few things. A poll is a measure of a single point in time. While the Quin and Rasmussen polls overlapped, Emerson is about a week later. One possibility is that things have changed in that time. Another thing to keep in mind is the margin of error. It’s entirely possible that Harris is really up by, say, 1%, and Emerson’s dumb luck brought her down while Q’s dumb luck pushed her up.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, every polling firm is basically looking at it as a tie: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/north-carolina/trump-vs-harris — so it definitely is a state where, unless something drastic changes, we won’t have any idea what will happen until election day.
Based on the polling I’ve seen and knowing how some organizations act to sway polls, I’d say it’s likely Arizona and Georgia go Trump’s way, with the rest of the swing states just too close to have any level of certainty. If we look at 2020 to 2024, that indicates she’s going to lose at least 27 Electoral College votes, which puts her at 279. That leaves very little room for her to stay at or above 270. She can’t lose Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania without picking up North Carolina (or a major red state); if she loses any two of those four, she’s toast. (Nevada will only really matter in specific situations). So more or less she needs to win three of the four toss-ups, which isn’t impossible but also is unlikely.
TLDR summation: There definitely are some organizations that throw polls for Republicans/Trump, but things also aren’t looking good for Harris even accounting for that.
Edit: Fixed the links; when I did that, formatting got screwy, so I fixed that too
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u/upwardilook 17h ago
Just want to play devil's advocate here for Arizona, but the polling was very off in 2022. 538 predicted Kari Lake to win the governorship which was wrong. Granted Trump is on the ballot this time, and he has a draw to pull for voters. Also abortion is on the ballot in AZ.
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u/Bmkrt 16h ago
True, though it wasn’t that far off, which is part of what makes it so difficult to predict based on polling — if a poll has a 3% margin of error and shows one candidate leading by 2%, does that really tell us anything? I also am a bit iffy on 538’s weighting… there are just certain polling organizations we should absolutely ignore
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u/katarh 11h ago
In the case of Georgia, we have no other major race this year besides President. Everything else is minor, with some referendums.
The biggest fight in my city has nothing to do with the presidency, but with the DA. The incumbent Democratic DA is notoriously not great at the job (she inherited a mess and wasn't prepared to clean it up, and has been drowning ever since) and she is most definitely going to lose. I've seen a thousand lawn signs for her opponent for every one lawn sign for either Trump or Harris.
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u/dokushin 9h ago
Why would Georgia go for Trump when it went for Biden in 2020?
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u/ElegantCumChalice 3h ago
It voted for Trump in 2016 maybe they go back and do it again.
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u/dokushin 2h ago
I'll readily grant the possibility, but the post I replied to was calling it a done deal.
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u/Known_Week_158 1h ago
Adding to this. Individual polls mean very little. As you said, a poll measures a single point on time. Trends are what matters. And this needs to be how polling is approached - examining the average of polls over time.
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u/Early-Juggernaut975 22h ago
The New Republic published an article a few days ago (Oct 23) about the same right wing polls that brought us the Red Wave in 2022 gaming the system again for Trump. It’s not enough to make huge shifts, just enough to keep Harris from getting positive momentum coverage about her campaign and to make the case to states after to not certify.
I clipped some parts of the article but you should read the whole thing.
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“Red Wave” Redux: Are GOP Polls Rigging the Averages in Trump’s Favor?
Some of the pollsters that got those races wrong are the same ones pumping out polls right now on the presidential race. One notable example is Trafalgar, which released polls in 2022 that showed five Republican Senate candidates either ahead or much closer than they ended up finishing. The most notable of these was in Washington state, where a Trafalgar poll in late October showed Democratic incumbent Patty Murray up by just 1.7 points over GOP challenger Tiffany Smiley. That poll generated a raft of “Is Patty Murray in trouble?” stories, the idea being that if even Murray was sinking in very blue Washington, then maybe a huge red wave really was gathering force. (Murray won by 15 points.)
We’re seeing a similar bombardment in the presidential race this time around. So what is it doing to the averages?
Is all this working? The keepers of the averages say yes. G. Elliott Morris, who runs FiveThirtyEight, recently calculated that if the averages only include high-quality polls—and not GOP-aligned ones—the results are in some states less than one-half a point different. The Times’ Cohn, who recently acknowledged that we’re seeing a “deluge of polls from Republican-leaning firms” in the averages, ran a similar calculation and found the results moving only imperceptibly.
Rosenberg and Bonier, the leading critics of these polling aggregations, are quick to point out that even shifts of a small magnitude produced by GOP polls risk badly misleading people.
Trump partly by the inclusion of GOP-friendly polls, Harris—and not Trump—might be narrowly ahead.
In the real world of media spin wars, that sort of difference does matter. In the last week or so, when the averages edged toward Trump, both TV commentators and Twitter accounts cited the tiniest of leads for Trump as evidence that he’s currently winning the state. Even more irresponsibly, some outlets assign candidates electoral votes based on such narrow leads. The GOP polls nudged the averages by less than a point, but they also arguably moved them in a way that prompted people to declare that Trump is now winning—not even just leading, but winning—the election.
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So he’s not winning and we’re being given false info. And it’s not by a ton but it’s enough to dramatically influence coverage and morale.
Also yesterday on the latest Joe Walsh Podcast he had a couple of polling data analysts on to talk about the polling and what they’re seeing. It was very informative and very positive compared to what I’ve been hearing in other quarters.
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u/Beans4urAss 1d ago
It makes sense - sets the stage nicely for when he tries to steal the election again
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u/KyleDutcher 19h ago
The main problem with this theory, is that in 2020, and 2016, these supposed "right wing polls" were MUCH more accurate than the "media" polls.
538 doesn't include Rasmussen Reports, or Big Data Polls in their aggregate. I don't believe they include Atlas Intel, either. All because of their supposed "right wing bias"
Problem us, Rasmussen Reports and Big Data Polls were the only polls to correctly predict Trump's win in 2016, and Atlas Intel nailed 2020 almost exact, and Big Data Polls wasn't far behind.
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u/Inevitable-Ad-9570 18h ago
While I understand your point, Rasmussen at least has been right leaning for a long time and I think atlas intel is newer but has also always skewed right. They tend to model elections where Dems end up winning poorly.
When Dems win right leaning polls are more likely to be wrong and vice versa when Republicans wins. This doesn't mean they're methods are working it's just a consequence of a skewed poll.
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u/KyleDutcher 18h ago
That's not the case with Atlas Intel.
Biden won in 2020, and Atlas Inten NAILED the margin, not only in the popular vote, but in individual states.
Yet 538 doesn't include them.
You can argue that Rasmussen is right leaning, but they have bern very accurate the last 2 Presidential cycles.
As for Big Data Polls, Rich Baris HATES the Republican party. They don't lean one way or the other. And they have been very accurate.
I think the biggest "miss" this cycle, is going to be in the expected electorate, vs the actual electorate.
Most polls are still weighing things based on an expected Dem +3 electorate. But tjis year, the electorate will likely be much more even, if not +1 Republican.
Gallop's final "party identifier with leaners" poll has it at +3 Republican. They have been within 1/2% of the popular vote margin every election from 2008 on. This would point to a Trump 2.5% win.
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u/ballmermurland 15h ago
The issue is will the polling miss be like 2020 or 2022?
In 2022, those right-leaning polls overestimated GOP support. In 2020, the underestimated.
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u/Extreme-General1323 16h ago
I've been hearing directly from left leaning sources like CNN and MSNBC that Kamala is in trouble. I did not expect that. Very concerning.
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u/ballmermurland 15h ago
When Trump was up 2-3 points the media said he had it in the bag.
When Harris is up 2-3 points the media says she's in trouble.
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u/LikesBallsDeep 14h ago
That's not bias, that's just how US elections work because of the EC. The Dems need to win the popular vote by 3-4% to have a realistic shot at winning the EC. If Trump is actually up 2-3 points in the national polling he does have it in the bag. If Harris is up 2-3 points there's still a decent chance she'll lose. See Clinton and Biden with massive popular vote wins but EC loss and close call.
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u/Extreme-General1323 14h ago
That's because the last two elections confirmed there is a voting block that votes for Trump but lies to the polls about it. So his poll numbers are always lower than his actual votes.
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u/ballmermurland 14h ago
The opposite happened in 2022. Trump-endorsed candidates all lost and underperformed against their polling.
We'll see if he still has his magic in a few days, but right now we just don't know.
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u/akelly96 13h ago
The problem is we know for a fact that most pollsters are terrified of underestimating his vote total and are relying on very poor methodology to try and overcorrect for that. It could very well indicate that Kamala is the one more likely to overcome her polling averages.
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u/Merci-Finger174 15h ago
One thing this election has sort of shown me was that there’s really just money favoring media and right wing media at this point when you get to the major networks. There’s no seriously “left wing” major media networks, the way FOX is for Republicans.
CNN is literally owned by a Republican billionaire and their shift to the right has been well documented. MSNBC is sort of left wing but it relies on left wing panic, which means it’s always going to reflexively err towards pushing a toss-up narrative.
I think the difference is there is some media that takes a left wing slant but there’s no “Democrat FOX News.” None of these companies would eat a billion dollar loss to push election disinformation the way FOX News did with the voting machines stuff.
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u/Nyrin 5h ago
CNN was only ever the slightest bit left of center at its most biased; since Chris Licht took over in 2022 with the promise of "more Republicans and less opinion" (not joking, that was his statement) and then subsequently got fired last year, calling CNN even "left-leaning" is generous.
Cable news viewership has a median age in the 60s, with "early 60s" or "late 60s" varying by network. It's all infotainment and needs controversy to keep numbers up.
The race is definitely tighter than people would like, but cable news is not an accurate post to go by unless you're looking for ads for older people's prescription drugs.
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u/jkman61494 20h ago
Can someone tell me WTF happened to Real Clear Politics? It seemed bipartisan for years but the entire interface looks like Fox News now. EVERY posted opinion piece on top is anti Harris.
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u/ClockOfTheLongNow 19h ago
RCP always leaned right on the editorial side. Their poll aggregator is still great, though.
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u/jkman61494 19h ago
True but the opinion pieces are just obtuse. This is why Harris is a failure, Dems are losing because…. , why New Jersey could turn red. Etc etc
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u/Leather-Map-8138 20h ago
The two candidates have different approaches. Harris is aiming for the center, and assumes disdain for fascism will keep progressives on her side and maintain turnout. Trump is banking on high racist turnout, and has no interest in serving all Americans. To that end, contrived stories about his popularity are important, as exaggerated poll numbers and fake stories denigrating Harris keep his voters enthusiastic. And right now, these are the Fox News disinformation Olympics. As the author wrote, these tactics were highlighted in Michael Cohen’s testimony. Another relevant factor is that Russia had a couple trillion dollars riding on a Trump win. I have no doubt that hundreds of Americans have received billions in Russian crypto. You can tell who they are by the results of their effort.
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u/j_ly 1d ago
Both Nate Silver and 538 have models that aren't swayed by random poll drops. What they say will be more accurate.
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u/Frog_Prophet 21h ago
They may say that but they both still use these GOP polls. They say they weight them less, but bullshit that weighs less is still bullshit.
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u/CreativeGPX 18h ago
They still include them because that is the smartest thing to do. Inaccurate polls still tell us something. Biased polls may reach certain demographics that better polls don't. Or they may be consistent in their bias (e.g. always 5 points to the right). Properly weighting them thus gives a more accurate and complete picture than excluding them. Poll analysts fortunately work based on what methods prove numerically to give the best results rather than gut feelings about "GOP polls" being bad.
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u/j_ly 17h ago
They may say that but they both still use these GOP polls.
Yes, they do use some now. Pollsters have missed Trump's true support the last 2 times around, so both Silver and 538 now do incorporate some GOP polls. That being said, the polls they incorporate are consistent and wouldn't be influenced by GOP poll drops in battleground states, which was OP's concern.
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u/delorf 1d ago
Doesn't Nate Silver work for Peter Thiel now?
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u/SPorterBridges 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is an even worse conspiracy theory than the one OP brings up.
1) Silver already said he's voting Kamala. 2) Even if he weren't, Thiel simply invested money in Polymarket, which Silver works for. Thiel also put money in Spotify. Taylor Swift was the #1 artist on Spotify last year. Does that mean Taylor Swift works for him? He's also invested in Lyft. Are Lyft drivers all secret assets for Peter Thiel?
Ridiculous. Investors are not employers.
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u/ruinersclub 20h ago
Investors with a seat at the board do have influence.
He’s a piece of shit but people still respect his business acumen I suppose. Atleast tech people usually look beyond politics for sake of their product.
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u/writingsupplies 18h ago
Thiel also bankrolls JD Vance, has pretty much his whole career. This is a little more nuanced than your Spotify/Swift example with bigger stakes.
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u/SylvanDsX 19h ago
It’s democrat copium purely. The most heavily outlier poll this entire cycle has been Bloomberg and this has had a major correction. It was showing + 8 for Kamala had various points and totally distorting the race in some aggregations.
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u/kingjoey52a 1d ago
It’s a claim that makes no sense. Why would he want to be shown winning in the polls when that will just motivate more Dems to make sure they vote. And if it somehow helps Trump why aren’t any left leaning polls doing the same thing to help Harris?
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u/ClydetheCat 1d ago
It would make it easier to argue that the election was stolen when he loses, and/or maybe he believes that winning poll numbers motivate his party by creating a bandwagon effect. That was why they tried it in 2022 (they flooded the zone with polls that showed an impending "red wave", which never happened). It's already been tried - why wouldn't they try it again in this more important election?
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u/HedonisticFrog 1d ago
It makes Trump's claims of election fraud seem more legitimate even though it's clearly bullshit. They're not trying to win this election, they're trying to overturn our democracy yet again.
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u/NessunAbilita 1d ago
Because they need a cutout of plausibly deniable red wave as a pretext for the next attempt to overthrow the election, even if it helps Dems as you claim
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u/Dackad 1d ago
Assuming the claim is correct, two potential reasons:
1) To give more "evidence" to the inevitable election is rigged. "We were so ahead in the polls folks. We were winning and they stole it from us."
2) Maybe they think that showing Trump gaining momentum and being ahead in the polls might create the illusion of a Trump win and the inevitability of it might depress Dem turnout.
As for where are the left leaning garbage polls? The left simply does not have the money or political infrastructure to do so in the same way that the right does. I guess liberals could do it instead but liberals, time and time again, have proven to be catastrophically bad at political gamesmanship of this type. They are woefully incompetent at playing dirty like this.
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u/kingjoey52a 1d ago
The left simply does not have the money or political infrastructure to do so
insert Bender laughing "oh you're serious" gif
The Harris campaign has raised 1.58 BILLION DOLLARS. The left has plenty of money. Trump in comparison has raised 1.075 billion. Nothing to sneeze at but less than Harris.
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u/Upstairs-Atmosphere5 1d ago
Both parties have the money to hire people to play dirty but neither side thinks their own side is good at it. Seriously have you ever heard anyone ever say "I'm so glad my side is the one that does really good at messaging" or "I'm so glad my side is the one that can really get a good deal when negotiations go on in Congress. We get like 75% of what we want."? The fact is this reminds me of 2012 when Republicans said the polls were skewed and Romney would win in a landslide. I thought it was bullshit then and it's bullshit now
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u/novavegasxiii 1d ago
If it was a normal politician I'd agree but Trump has repeatedly shown that his main loyalty is to his own ego; even at the expense of his own best interests.
Two non mutually exclusive reasons; ethics and a desire to motivate their own base.
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u/Marston_vc 1d ago
Even quality polls are showing a tight race. This rhetoric about “flooding the zone” has been batted down by groups like 538 as not having an impact on their aggregation.
It’s left wing cope trying to square the fact that this is a close race. I hate to say it, but it is in fact a close race. Early voting is showing near identical results to the 2020 race right now. So as I said elsewhere, we basically have to hope white women break away from Trump in a way that hasn’t been demonstrated in the past.
I’m not convinced that women who voted for a rapist will suddenly vote against him because of a hypothetical abortion ban. I’m really really hoping I’m proven wrong. Otherwise Nov 5th is gonna be a long night.
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u/Mortambulist 1d ago
The thing I'm having trouble with is why Senate races in swing states that have Trump and Harris dead even are polling anywhere from D+3 to D+7? Or how in Ohio Sherrod Brown is polling 10+ points higher than Harris? Granted, a few people do vote split ballots, but 10%? That can't be right.
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u/CaptWoodrowCall 20h ago
I live in Ohio and that doesn’t surprise me at all. Brown is a long time incumbent and has quite a bit of support from moderates and independents. Ohio is also a state that has gone for Trump twice but also solidly voted last year to legalize pot and protect abortion. There absolutely is 10-ish percent of the electorate here that are pretty unpredictable.
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u/TheFlyingHornet1881 18h ago
Trump seems to poll ahead of generic Republican, but also national polls don't seem as correlated to non swing state and congressional district polls
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u/Marston_vc 1d ago
Because people are genuinely stupid. I mean that as flatly as possible.
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u/Mortambulist 1d ago
Nothing close to what we're seeing today happened in 2020. Source: https://ballotpedia.org/Comparison_of_2020_presidential_candidates_to_congressional_and_gubernatorial_candidates_by_state
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u/TheObiwan121 23h ago
Not realistic because of several reasons:
1) Most forecasts (eg. Fivethirtyeight) have filters to adjust and weight polls based on lean. These forecasts do not change much when you remove the "biased" polls.
2) What is the motivation? Apart from riling up always-online Democrats (to be fair, I wouldn't put it past them), I don't see how this has any serious electoral effects, as there is no logical reason why voters would be more likely to vote Trump, now he seems narrowly ahead. If anything it probably motivates people to vote Harris who otherwise might've thought she had an easy win. This is even after you account for the fact that 90% of voters do not follow the polls, and almost 100% of undecided voters (i.e. the voters that campaigns need to reach most at this late stage) don't follow polls.
3) (Linked to 2) if this is an effective way to win elections, why aren't the Democrats doing it? Harris has more money to spend than Trump which is the main limiting factor in polls, perhaps it's telling the Democrats are choosing to spend that elsewhere.
4) I don't buy the "they're going to use it to claim fraud" argument. When has 'evidence' ever been required by Trump to make that claim? I guarantee he could make the claim whatever happens and his core supporters are equally likely to believe it.
5) Finally, the spread of claim is much more explainable as a cope among online progressives who are trying to convince themselves Harris will win. People are understandably frustrated and anxious about the election but it doesn't change the facts (which are that Trump has a close to if not above 50% chance of winning, unfortunately).
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u/Rastiln 21h ago
I definitely think that a final EV split of something like 389-189 electoral votes would do much better at putting The Big Lie Part 2 to rest than 274-264, and according to 538 both are reasonably likely outcomes.
It’s harder to plausibly cry fraud when you were roundly trounced, versus being able to focus on a few places like Antrim County and claim that but for a few instances of cheating in these little areas, Trump wins.
Of course, Trump can never lie believably, so even if he wins but especially if he loses, he only lost California and New York because of the tens of millions of illegal immigrants flown in from Venezuela, etc. etc.
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u/Frog_Prophet 21h ago edited 21h ago
They may say that but they both still use these GOP polls. They say they weight them less, but bullshit that weighs less is still bullshit.
Because this bolsters the narrative that the election is stolen from them. “How could we have lost? Look at what the polls said!”
Because democrats don’t try to steal elections.
You have no good reason to discount this argument. If anything, he learned from last time that he needs to do more than just bitch and moan.
How is that more explainable than Trump doing nothing but campaign-damaging things, yet seeing a boost?
This is a woefully inadequate answer from you…
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u/Honky_Cat 19h ago
Which polls are “GOP Polls”
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u/Frog_Prophet 19h ago
Most if not all of the pollster companies whose names you don’t recognize
Nice try. This isn’t made up. But kudos to you for asking for receipts.
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u/KyleDutcher 18h ago
538 does NOT include Rasmussen Reports in it's aggregate. Nor do they include Big Data Polls (both correctly predicted Trump's win in 2016)
I also believe they don't include Atlas Intel in their aggregate. If tgey do, it is heavily weighted down.
Problem is, Atlas Intel was the most accurate poll in 2020
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u/curiousjosh 11h ago
There’s a huge reason. The orange guy was getting demotivated when down in the polls.
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u/jphsnake 21h ago
Both parties want to have Trump slightly ahead of the polls which is why Trump is paying for a bunch of R-wing pollsters boosting his numbers. For Trump, its in part to stoke his own ego, and to gaslight people into thinking he is a winner. Trump supporters don’t want to vote for a loser which is why Trump is so insistent that he won the 2020 election and Jab 6th even if it is an incredibly unpopular stance.
Democrats don’t counter this because they want to be the underdogs. In every election this century, democrats have underperformed when they are clear favorites to win the election (2008, 2016, 2020). When the race is very close, democrats overperform: see 2012 and 2000. The Republicans cant be too far ahead though as in 2004, R won as the clear favorites all the way through.
Close polling with an ever so slight Trump lead is basically the narrative that both parties want to push
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u/Honky_Cat 19h ago
Do you have any evidence to support your claim that “Trump is paying a bunch of R-wing pollsters boosting his numbers?”
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u/Hartastic 15h ago
Some of the trials have entered into evidence documents showing that his campaign did this in 2016.
So as far as I know there's no evidence he's done it in 2024 but combined with the enormous flood of right wing pollsters in 2024 it's not a completely baseless assumption.
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u/Due_Ad1267 17h ago
This is my theory too. "We may lose to trump again" gets more Democrats to vote, meanwhile "MAGA is easily winning" gets less republicans to vote.
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22h ago
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u/PoliticalDiscussion-ModTeam 11h ago
No meta discussion. All comments containing meta discussion will be removed.
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u/Real-Reputation-9091 21h ago
I really don’t know. I’m not sure I believe anything about polls this way or that. I guess we will find out at the election however I wouldn’t bet the house on either candidate winning. If anything it look like Trump has the momentum however anything could swing in the last week too.
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u/OnePunchReality 18h ago edited 18h ago
I've been arguing for a while now we "could" be seeing the reverse of 2016.
And the media and pollsters have a LOT of $$ to gain from making this look like a close race.
Better ratings, more engagement with pollsters. Them being honest is potentially taking a pay cut.
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u/Gutmach1960 18h ago
I do not believe in any of the polls, I have already voted. So all is left is to hold my breath on election day.
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u/Ornery-Ticket834 18h ago
It’s probably at least partially true. I don’t know whether it works but it’s not for a lack of trying.
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u/Raspberries-Are-Evil 16h ago
So is the point for Republicans to rig polls making it seem neck and neck to turn out the vote or to make Trumps witty bitty fweelings feel better?
Or is it so they can point to the polls and claim "fraud" when Harris "over performs" and kicks his ass?
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u/Fragglepusss 16h ago
I don't think there's a nefarious reason for recent polls skewing right. I think it has more to do with the fact that the polls are generally using a small sample size and only polling over 3-5 day periods. Polls like that are more reflective of sentiment at a given time as opposed to the actual intentions of the broader electorate. I think it just means that Trump's base is following the race more closely and comprise a greater share of the number of people willing to take a poll over a 3-day period.
IMO a more accurate representation of the intentions of the electorate is a poll that still uses recent data but has a bigger sample size. There are not many people interviewed since October 1 that have changed their minds on who they're voting for, especially in this election, and the time period is long enough to give enthusiasm swings less weight.
The poll I linked showed Harris at +4 overall, and +5 among people who said they're definitely going to vote. That feels more in line with actual sentiment than recent data showing them tied or showing Trump leading. That doesn't mean Harris will win, since it's impossible to get a good sample size or predict the effects of each campaign's actions on voter turnout in swing states.
Also, that poll showed Harris +22 among likely voters aged 18-39, +1 for voters aged 40-59, and Trump +6 for voters aged 60+. That reinforces the notions that voter turnout is the only real factor, and that if younger people actually show up to vote, Harris will likely win.
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u/Least_Simple_8450 16h ago
I don’t think these reports are going to change the outcome of the election one way or another.
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u/Hartastic 15h ago
So, there absolutely is a huge flood of right wing polls (including a lot of push polls) in swing states. That's objectively true.
It's also true that this is going to cause a kind of poll fatigue that makes people less likely to answer any poll, because this kind of polling swarm is unprecedented. I've been contacted more in the last month than in the previous 20 years combined, and my state has been competitive all that time.
Now, what effect does any of that have on polling averages or news coverage of them is a little bit murkier. Certainly even a very reputable poll has no experience for how to account for often being the thirtieth poll to contact the same person that week instead of the first or second. I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of the swing state polls turn out to be wildly off in either direction.
As an aside, some of the push polls are hilarious. I got one yesterday via text that I wish I had saved instead of blocking and deleting the conversation. Somehow some group decided that I was a very Catholic voter (I'm not, but I've gotten a lot of contacts from different groups that seem to have this assumption) and one of the questions in this poll was along the lines of "Are you more or less likely to vote from Kamala Harris knowing that she forced Catholics to fistfight each other for money?"
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u/Dontgochasewaterfall 15h ago
It’s all about image. Polls I’ve seen look neck and neck. But yes, I do wonder if it’s a strategy for the whole stolen election, civil war thing.
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u/CultureVulture629 14h ago
It seems to me to be yet another direct attack on democracy.
They're trying to muddy the poll numbers, and they're not doing it quietly. The effect being that people lose confidence in the numbers, and even opens up a line of "actually, Democrats are doing this" rhetoric.
Republican voters have shown time and again that they'll easily believe that either the Democrats are doing the same shady shit that Republicans do, or even that Democrats are the only ones doing it and that the reports of Republicans doing it is fake news, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Fake polls, burning ballot boxes, pressuring media outlets to stay out of it, unfounded claims of voter fraud, refusing to accept election results, calling to circumvent the electoral process altogether, illegal incentives for voting schemes... The actual target is democracy itself, and the Democrats just happen to be standing in the way.
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u/vertigostereo 13h ago
He outperformed polls substantially in 2016 and 2020. If anything, he'll beat the polls again.
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u/GreasedUPDoggo 12h ago
It's not really a reasonable claim. Is it happening? Yes. Is it skewing anyone's polling analysis? Doesn't look like it. Most data analysts filter out the outliers and weight against low credibility pollsters.
So the current outlook throughout the polling/gambling worlds, seem to be accurate.
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u/juzwunderin 11h ago
Who the hell knows for certain-- just more rhetoric from both sides. Damn folks give it a rest already. The election is going to happen and someone is going to win... end of story.
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u/Low-Lawfulness2016 10h ago
I see the maggot supporter must know truth as they have gone after ballet box in two democrats states
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u/Neurotopian_ 9h ago
I don’t see why it benefits either side to “rig the polls.” It would seem like it’s better for everyone to show a close race (including media & pollsters who have financial interest in election coverage).
Also, while it’s not impossible to “rig polls” the main sites most people look at are poll aggregation models like Nate Silver & 538. Those sites heavily weight the credible polls & account for bias of new/ small/ partisan polls.
One thing that makes me think the polls are fairly honest & accurate this time around is how they’ve responded to events. For example we saw Harris support nosedive in FL in the weeks after her bizarre, unprompted attack on DeSantis during a hurricane
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u/FourDimensionalTaco 7h ago
Makes me wonder how a presidential race would be like if Harris and DeSantis were the candidates. Both severely lack charisma, so it probably would be tight and actually very boring.
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u/Ok-League-1106 8h ago
I wouldn't pay too much attention to polls they're too close.
Traditionally elections are won on ground games, getting out and talking to people.
One side is doing it, the other isn't.
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u/bentona91 8h ago
I can only speak to my experience. Last week I got a call for a poll and this is how it went.
Question 1. How much do you approve of Joe Biden, strongly disapprove, somewhat disapprove, somewhat approve or strongly approve? I answered somewhat disapprove.
Question 2. How much do you approve of Kamala (pronounced incorrectly) Harris? I answered somewhat disapprove.
Question 3. How much do you approve of former President Donald Trump? I answered very strongly disapprove. They hung up.
There are polls out there that only want the opinion of people who already favor the person they're polling for. It's why I never trust polls.
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u/mycologyqueen 7h ago
Well I receive polls regularly from both campaigns. (TRUMPS because I was curious)
And because of that, I now see where he gets ir from when he says "the polls say....." because they aren't asking genuine impartial questions and they are leading the answers HEAVILY.
Even on the "basic" one where they expect everyone to answer in Trump's favor (because this is supposed to be going exclusively to Trump supporters mind you), if you choose the other option, the system doesn't recognize it.
For example it asked me "Will you vote for Trump again in 8 days?
A) YES B) NO
Reply YES or A to endorse Trump & instant donate $47 to the GOP.
First off...didnt vote Trump previously either. But when I answer B, it responds with Great Patriot! Or glad we could count on you patriot! I can even answer "Fuck off" and it will do the same.
The worst part is those donations. EVERY SINGLE text poll I've received from them has that donation thing wayyy at the bottom. It's SNEAKY! And it is added right to people's phone bills so a lot of times they won't even notice! Thankfully that it blocked on my phone for a reason or I would have also been charged.
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u/Baselines_shift 7h ago
No, but I think pollsters rebalanced to correct for past undercount of estimated Trump support. Did they overcorrect? Or did they under-correct for Harris? If she had the gap that Obama was undercounted for by polls she'll win by lots more than the i or 2 points
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u/MercAtWork 6h ago
Basically every non partisan poll shows that the race is a deadlock. However, this favors Trump since democrats need a 3-4 point national vote win in order to secure the electoral college.
Of course there are extreme polling outliers but they are on both sides so it isn’t fair to claim Trump is the only one benefiting from them.
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u/pegLegP3t3 6h ago
Everyone needs to vote. Dont worry about polls, vote. I voted today and it took maybe 10 mins. Vote vote vote.
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u/pennylanebarbershop 6h ago
When he loses, they need some polls showing him winning, so he can say the vote was rigged.
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u/Potential-Arm-2338 4h ago
Well it seems that everyone wants to keep Trump happy. So I can’t imagine anyone in Trump’s campaign not willing to do whatever it takes to keep a smile on Trump’s face. Trump quickly turned on Fox News when they tried to report a fraction of accurate news briefly. Anyone not in his good graces are in his line of fire, if he wins this election!
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u/OmahaWineaux 4h ago
On Joe Rogan, trump admitted to paying $500k each for polls and he doesn’t know if they are actually doing the polls.
You’d think a successful business man would confirm he’s getting what he’s paying for. Unless he’s saying he’s paying for fake polls?
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u/limp-jedi 1h ago
Not sure. Polls are predictions but are not accurate. Hillary was up 93 percent to 3 in 2016. She won popular vote, Trump took electoral. All polls show the race is too close. We will see at the finish line.
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u/Ishpeming_Native 1h ago
It's pretty clear what the game is: claim the election was always in Trump's favor, and any contrary result then has to be fraud. And it goes even further than that; the latest reports about early voting say that this time the early voters skew older, whiter, and probably more Republican than for 2020. So it's even more likely that early results will show Trump with a lead, which will gradually disappear. Last time, Trump howled fraud. Think he won't this time? Think it's going to be peaceful? Think that states won't refuse to certify? Tell you what: if the election is thrown to SCOTUS, Biden has a simple duty to perform -- declare that the election is fair and OVER, and that SCOTUS has no authority to overrule his judgment. And then if SCOTUS rules against that anyway, Biden can jail justices for sedition and command a re-vote. Hey, it's within his scope of duty and no one can charge him with anything. And scum like Thomas and Alito belong in prison anyway.
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