Now that the twin Krakens have been carefully lifted with a tweezers and laid to rest, and with the rest of the judicial debacle is coming to an end, the Trump fraudsters have unveiled a new line of evidence-free evidence: Polling data.
Yes, it turns out that it was mathematically impossible for Joe Biden to have crushed Donald Trump because faux-intellectual Republican pollsters have furrowed their brows and said so. It’s a novel argument that goes something like this:
“There must have been fraud in this election! Our pollsters couldn’t have been this wrong!”
The small cottage industry of right-wing propagandists masquerading as pollsters is actually citing its own failure to predict the 2020 results accurately as proof positive that the election was rigged. It’s a stupid enough argument to appeal to the Trump base.
For context, understand that the swaggering geniuses at the likes of the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports and the so-called Democracy Institute (DI) -- you’re forgiven if you don’t follow their work -- made headlines assuring Republicans that Trump would shock the world again. Puffed up as the broken clocks who got it right regarding Trump’s 2016 election win, these “experts” hedged their bets on another Trump stunner in 2020.
Obviously, they were wrong, bigly. Trafalgar Group, headed by self-assured Robert Cahaly, had garnered the New York Times headline “The One Pollster in America Who Is Sure Trump Is going to Win” right before the election. Trafalgar had “Michigan, Florida and Arizona in the president’s column,” the subhead proclaimed.
Well, one out of three ain’t good. In addition to whiffing on the 27 electoral votes in Michigan and Arizona, Trafalgar predicted Trump wins by an easy 4.3 percent in Georgia, 1.9 percent in Pennsylvania and .7 percent in Nevada. That’s another 42 electoral votes missed, for a total of 69 in the wrong column. (Tellingly, Trafalgar tried to inoculate himself on Fox News’
Hannity” by claiming in advance that Trump would need to win Pennsylvania by 5 point to overcome fraud.)
Bottom line: Trafalgar predicted a Trump electoral landslide instead of the Biden electoral landslide that happened in real life. But he’s unbowed and the fact that his predictions didn’t match outcomes is widely cited as proof of thievery. Consider this week’s tweet literally threatening Georgia Republicans with a primary over alleged fraud that he doubled down upon in a non-sequitur of a recent poll question:
Pretty much the same fate befell the other geniuses: Rasmussen hedging strategy entails releasing selective polling data, but it found Trump having taken a 1 percent lead in national polling in its “White House Watch” one day before the election. That was only wrong by about 8 million votes.
DI, headed by an impressively pompous fellow with a British accent named Patrick Basham, also predicted a 1 percent national victory for Trump (down from the 5 percent national win that didn’t quite happen in 2016). The London’s Daily and Sunday Express partnered with DI to produce this headline on November 1: “Donald Trump Set to Win U.S. Presidency by Electoral College Landslide.”
That brilliant prediction was based on data suggesting Trump would win not only the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but only Minnesota, New Hampshire and Nevada for a total of 326 electoral votes. How’d that work out?
If you’re wondering why any of this might matter, consider that Basham, the very loser who is the face of this polling, continues to parade around the right-wing stratosphere as the expert whose failure is proof of the rigged election. On November 8, Trump cited him as “best pollster in Britain” --based on nothing--in this tweet:
What’s more amazing is that Basham continues to garner much attention in places as mainstream programming as Mark Levin’s toxic “Life Liberty & Levin.” The host billed Basham’s appearance this week as “A MUST SEE:”
Basham, the guy who just missed getting the 2020 election right by 94 electoral votes in both directions, not only doesn’t have his tail properly tucked between his legs for his epic failure. No, he haughtily cites some dozen bizarre “metrics” (such as the fact that no incumbent has ever increased his vote and lost) as proof that Biden couldn’t have beaten Trump.
This might easily be dismissed as if Basham were a poor fellow holding up a sign in front of some seedy London bar except for one detail: Levin has 2.8 million followers who believe this drivel just because of the accent and his authoritative use of indecipherably big words. And Levin is not alone. Consider this from human train wreck Newt Gingrich:
Again, the theme is the same: Basham’s theory of the case is that his own colossal misjudgment -- like that of Trafalgar -- can only be explained by fraud and stealing by the Democrats. What else could it be? Certainly not the fact that none of these clowns comply with even the basic standards of the polling industry.
Yes, that industry took another round of deserved hits over questions about its methodologies becoming outdated, and some state polls that were way off in places like Wisconsin and Michigan. But if you bet the farm on the Real Clear Politics (RCP) “no tossup” final polls, you got 48 states right, missing only Florida and Georgia, one in each direction.
This much is clear: If RCP had missed the mark by 94 electoral votes, no sane person would be citing that as proof of cheating in the election. But if you’re on the Right trying to rationalize Trump’s epic loss, who needs sanity?