By Mike Killalea, NSD president
More GOP sneaky tricks have some of us worrying that Trump is winning. Don’t believe it.
“In the last few weeks Republicans have dropped more than 60 polls into the polling averages to make it look like Donald Trump is winning an election he isn’t,” writes Simon Rosenthal in the Hopium Chronicles. “They would only be going to these extraordinary lengths to game the polling averages if they believed he wasn’t winning.”
Further, Rosenthal noted, 12 of the last 15 general election polls released for Pennsylvania have right-wing or GOP affiliations.
This is like a magician’s act – look over here at the poll numbers, folks. If that many people like Trump, how bad can he be?? Pay no attention to the orange rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon behind the curtain! (And 10,000 flies can’t be wrong, right?)
And in the meantime, polls are actually encouraging for the good guys, while GOP internal polling is worrying the Trumpers. More on that below.
Flooding the zone with sh*t
First, remember fascist Steve Bannon’s idea to “flood the zone with sh*t”? Well that’s what’s going on.
Trump’s campaign is telling us, look, Trump may be a dangerous extremist, a bigot, misogynist and a racist but he is leading in the polls and is strong, warns Rosenthal.
Trump may want to end the global economy which has made us prosperous, end the Western alliance which has kept us safe, end American democracy which has kept us free, but he is leading in the polls and is strong.
Trump is leading in the polls and is strong is a way to make all his ugliness disappear. Which is why his campaign is working so hard to create a false impression that he's ahead. To Trump it is arguably the most important "issue" in the election
Their flooding the zone with these right-wing polls is a sign of weakness, not strength, my friends. It is a tactic to help obscure his ugliness and extremism, and we should prepare for far more of it this week.
Rosenthal cautions to be ready for the Trump campaign to trot out threat of the “hidden Trump vote.” Rosenthal predicts that, while this might have been true in 2020, it has not been true for Trump or Republicans since Dobbs. Democrats have been the party with the hidden vote. We’ve been overperforming polls for 2.5 years now.
“Their campaign to game the polling averages and make it appear like Trump is winning—when he isn't—escalated in [the] last few days.”
Remember the mythical Red Wave?
This isn’t the first time the GOP has weaponized polling, he said. In October 2022, right before the midterms, Republican-leaning polls flooded the zone, leading many in the media to predict a “red wave” that would swamp Democrats and turn control of the battleground states, the House, and the Senate over to the GOP.
But the red wave was a manufactured story, and it never crashed ashore. Instead, Democrats (and anti-extremist Republicans) won nearly across the board in the key swing states, gaining one seat in the Senate and only barely losing the House due to poor performance by Democrats in big blue states like New York and California.
Trump’s bad news
Pollsters and analysts were reportedly stunned after an internal polling memo circulated by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, showed former President Donald Trump struggling in key battleground states.
The memo, dated October 8 and obtained by Politico, included polling where Trump trailed Vice President Kamala Harris by 3 points in Michigan and by 1 point in Pennsylvania. The candidates were tied in Nevada and Arizona, while Trump led in Wisconsin by 1 point.
For us, better news is out there
In the better-news department, Harris leads Trump by three points in Reuters/Ipsos poll, and voter enthusiasm is higher than in 2020.
The new poll, which closed on Sunday, gave signs that voters - particularly Democrats - might be more enthused about this year's election than they were ahead of the November 2020 presidential election when Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump.
Some 78% of registered voters in the three-day poll - including 86% of Democrats and 81% of Republicans - said they were "completely certain" they would cast a ballot in the presidential election. The share of sure-to-vote poll respondents was up from 74% in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Oct. 23-27, 2020, when 74% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.
The poll had a margin of error of around 4 percentage points.
Even better, the latest national poll from Marist — an A-rated pollster — has Harris leading Trump 52-47, a 5-point margin. It’s her largest lead yet with this pollster.
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