The New Advice Heading Into the Election: Ignore the Polls
Republicans are said to be using “information chaos” to try to depress Democratic turnout
Over the last week or so, political analysts, journalists and others have offering voters some new advice: ignore the polls.
That’s right. These pundits and prognosticators are telling Americans to quit doom scrolling and put down their phones.
And they have a variety of reasons for saying so.
Many Americans have been anxious about the outcome of the election for weeks, as both major candidates bob and weave within the margin of error of many public opinion polls, with neither taking clear advantages either nationally or in those handful of crucial battleground states across the country that will prove decisive in the all-important Electoral College.
Democrats, in particular, have been all white knuckles with memories of election night in 2016 when former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but Trump became president because he squeaked by in that Electoral College.
“I think there’s some PTSD, not just from 2016 but even 2020, where the polling miss in 2020 was bigger than the polling miss in 2016, comprehensively,” said author and journalist John Heilemann. “Joe Biden was supposedly up by these large amounts, and we saw basically a four-point polling swing, polling miss across the battleground states.”
Gene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris could benefit from the effort of her supporters, not their anxiety.
“Please go see your therapist. But in the meantime, go out and just work for her,” he said. “You know, make phone calls with that phone instead of using it just to scroll through the polling that’s not going to tell you anything new. In fact, she raised $1 billion in three months, and her campaign has maybe the biggest field operation, certainly that I’ve ever seen or heard of, thousands and thousands of field workers in all the states, 2,500 in the battleground states alone. They should be in a really good position with all those hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get out the vote.
“By the way, the election’s already started in a lot of states. So get up off the couch, go help bring this home, because she is in a really good position to be the next president of the United States,” Robinson added.
Acclaimed TV journalist and anchor Dan Rather was even more pointed.
As he wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, Steady:
With the current make-up of the electorate, one that is increasingly polarized, neither candidate was likely to run away with this election. So set your anxieties aside, and let’s take a look at what is really going on.
The polling data does not point to a crumbling of the Blue Wall — those all-important swing states that propelled Joe Biden to the White House in 2020.
The Sunbelt swing states are not out of reach.
There is no hard evidence that “the race is slipping away” from Kamala Harris.
Polls are often wrong. Really wrong.
And Democratic influencer Jeff Tiedrich sees a nefarious plan from the Trump campaign in the nail-biting polling in this race.
Specifically, he points a finger directly at disgraced — and currently incarcerated — Trump advisor, Steve Bannon.
Republicans and others on the right are proliferating poor quality polls, which comes out of the Bannon playbook known as “flooding the zone with shit,” Tiedrich wrote.
The goal is to create “information chaos,” he said.
“they’re flooding the zone with shit polls — polls that show [Trump ] is winning, when he’s not,” Tiedrich added. “the goal? to make you give up and stay home on election day.”
Specifically, Tiedrich said, Republicans are exploiting the propensity among Democrats to panic.
“yes, it’s still infuriatingly close. it’s fucking maddening that 46.1% of voters are totally fine with a fascist game show host in advanced cognitive decline running the country — but that’s exactly why we have to remain motivated. we can’t stay home in despair,” he said. “there are more of us than there are of them. if we vote, we win.”
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