Timothy Birdnow

Very, very interesting indeed!

Statistician Nate Silver Accuses Pollsters of Lying to Keep Race Close

Silver is far from a MAGA man, or even a Republican. In fact the Democrats USED to love him. But now he is saying pollsters are "herding" because they are all getting the same numbers and those numbers are withing a fraction of each-other.

Silver himself has Trump chances of winning being 55% to 45% for Harris.

I have always held a low opinon of polling, which is usually wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. In the election of 1980 most polls showed Reagan slightly ahead in a photo-finish contest just one week before the election, and in fact Gallup showed him down considerably, yet Reagan won in a landslide. I chalk that up to the Wilder/Bradley Effect where people are embarrassed to tell pollsters what they really think but rather tell them what they think the pollsters want to hear. When someone is demonized, be it Reagan in '80 or Trump in '16 or '24 it is hard for a person, especially a weaker person, to admit they are going to vote for "Hitler" (both men being called that at the time).

But there is just plain old intentional bias too. Polls are now tools to lead public opinion and not reflect it. My wife worked as a pollster for a short time but realized that was the intent all along. Polls showing a razor-thin race helps the losing party keep up morale, and sets up legal and political challenges to the validity of the winner. It also helps turn out the vote. Now, this is a double-edged sword and can come back to bite the Democrats but if one assumes Trump is winning the media would most definitely do this, and so would most of the (liberal) pollsters. I agree with Silver; "Republican" pollsters are just lazy and fear going outside of the conventional wisdom.

Of course the pollsters also have to actually talk to someone and Democrats are far more likely to have the time to spent half an hour or more on the phone with one.

Any way you slice it polls are b.s. The REAL polls are the ones run as internal polling by the parties, who know what is REALLY happening. The ones seen by the public are messaged and managed and intended to both keep the race close and to promote an ultimate Democrat vicotry.

Our news is all morality play these days. Ace of Spades called it the "MacGuffin" which is defined as "an object, device, or event necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but typically unimportant or irrelevant in itself ." I don't know much about no MacGuffins (I thought they were McDonald's new breakfast sandwhich) but I do understand morality plays and the use of Passion Plays in Medieval times. Our political system is all theatre, a passion play designed to make a point and keep us distracted.

The Democrats are always the good guys, white hat wearing heroes who are forced to fight those dastardly cowards with the black capes and stovepipe hats and waxed mustaches. It's what is sometimes called a "melerdrama", a charicature of the roles. The question is how will the good guys win! There has to be drama, there has to be struggle, complications, missteps on the road to the happy ending. The media reports it throughy that lense, as high drama with the "good guys" winning in the end.

Of course this is taking the situation 360* out of phase. The GOP are not the good guys either; at best they are the greedy flim-flam men who have to be forced to do the right thing, like Professor Waldo Wigglesworth in the old Hoppity Hoooper cartoons. (Hoppity Hooper was a Jay Ward production, from the same guy who brought us Rocky and Bullwinkle.) Or it is like the Wizard in the Oz story. The Democrats are the guys who have sold their souls to Satan and seek the ruin of all Mankind. The true good guys are those of us in Middle America trying to save what is left of our religion, our culture, and our way of life.

But the media doesn't see it that way. They frame the Democrats as the good guys and always seek the drama to keep Americans off kilter and fighting the wrong fights while the Leftist Establishment moves steadily forward with their schemes of societal evolution. Even when we win politically we end up losing culturally. Look at the Bush era, for instance.

when George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, did any of us believe twenty years later we would be opnely calling for socialism, waging war on oil, supporting terrorist Muslims against Israel, having homosexual marriages be accepted and talking about castrating small children as "gender affirming care"? Eight years of Bush saw the Left make huge gains. We won the political battle but largely have lost the war.

Now Trump is our last hope and now half the country, despite seeing the fruits of this leftism, still hate and loath him.

None of that could have happened without the media, the universities, government, and the pollsters.

So if our politics seems to you to be a fiction, a farce, a staged production, know that it largely is and Silver is no doubt right here.

Yes, there are encouraging signs like Musk taking over Twitter. Musk is a danger to the Left because, unlike Fox News, it is not at the service of the Left. Fox serves a useful purpose to the Left, which is why they allow it to exist; it acts as a safety valve to allow pressure to be relieved on the conservative public in Middle America. (Read Huxley's Brave New World where they discuss this very thing.) As Sun Tzu said, one must offer an enemy a "golden bridge of retreat" lest he get iron in his spine and fight to the last. Fox News serves that purpose; it APPEARS right wing at times but in the end, when it really matters, Fox will turn tail and run. Look at the way they simply refused to cover vote fraud/tampering in 2020, for instance. The fired their top host and paid a huge sum of cash to Dominion over a lawsuit they probably would have won (nobody wins those types of libel suits against journalists). Why?

Because Fox likes being part of the Establishment, an insider. That's where the money is, the power is, and the pleasures money and power bring.

Nobody wanted to be Rush Limbaugh, or Christopher Ruddy at Newsmax, or anyone who actually spoke the Truth because they became anathema. Trump is anathema, a kind of taboo totem. In fact he is basically Emmanuel Goldstein from Orwell's 1984; a biword, the man everyone HAD to hate for two minutes every day. That is what Trump is now for the Left; a boogeyman.

But it's all just a big play performed by the media.

The polls are just another such tool. They have to make them close to put excitement into the race so people can walk away with the satisfaction of triumphing over evil if the Democrats win - and with the resolve to fight harder if they lose.

Passion plays were often blamed for pogroms against Jews during the Middle Ages. The modern passion plays are doing likewise, only instead of Jews it is leading to attacks on Conservatives, Christians, Jews, and working class and middle class Americans. But it is the same thing.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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