Without evidence, the Republican vice presidential candidate tried to cast doubt on his opponent’s obvious momentum: “If you talk to insiders in the Kamala Harris campaign, they’re very worried about where they are”
You’ve heard Donald Trump cry “fakenews” too many times to count, and now his running mate is claiming — without evidence — that the media is using “fake polls” to show Vice President Kamala Harris is in the lead in the presidential race.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Sen. J.D. Vance alleged that “The media uses fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and to create dissension and conflict with Republican voters.”
Don’t trust polls.
There’s always an element of society who pretend they don’t know who they’re voting for yet. They’re voting for bad things, they know they’re bad, and they are embarrassed to tell pollsters.
Vote.
Not to mention the incredibly questionable ways of gathering data.
Like calling people in the day, on their PHONES, asking how they might consider voting. Like MF, I’m working in the day and I’m not picking up a random phone call to tell you about my political alignment.
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s still even possible to do an accurate poll these days, what with how hard it is to get accurate representation of the following groups: people who ignore all unrecognised calls, people who hang up as soon as they can tell it’s a mass call rather than something for them specifically, and people who don’t want others to have accurate information. It’s even difficult to accurately measure the size of each of those groups, let alone figure out what they think.
I had a pollster call me at 10pm.
High quality pollings (Gallup, Ipsos, various university polling groups) are consistently reliable within the margin of error. There’s no point in being afraid or dismissive of them.
There are plenty of people who are disinterested or uninformed. They aren’t naturally malicious simply because they don’t religiously follow political news. Lots of them don’t even know if they’re going to vote until early voting starts, and even then only vote as part of their family or social group rather than because they have an emotional attachment to one of the parties.
The regional nature of voting tends to mean that if you’re too shy to express your views, you aren’t in the majority anyway. Its the guy who answers the phone in a MAGA hat and shouts “Hell yeah I’m voting fer Trump!” that you have to worry about, not the one who is too shy to whisper support for RFK Jr down the line.
This isn’t telling you to not be confident or to be scared, this is telling you to not assume victory is assured. Vote regardless of polling. Polling can be accurate or not. If the polling is accurate, and a majority would vote for A, but A is so far ahead of B that A-voters sit out the race, B can still win if enough voters choose to stay home.
Who looks at a 50/48 polling split and thinks victory is assured? That’s still within the margin of error and it doesn’t even include battleground swings.
But if it was 60/40? Yeah, I’d feel pretty assured. You’d be a fool not to.
People keep talking about this like it ever actually happens? Name one candidate that lost an election because the polling was too favorable.