Just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed that everything was going swimmingly for the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, showing them leading in almost every key swing state and nationally, with the Democratic ticket’s lead growing as large as four to five percentage points.
Now, however, with Election Day less than two weeks away, you see endless stories in the media about how former president Donald Trump is gaining momentum and could even be considered the favorite.
What in the world is going on here?!
It’s called poll rigging, and as Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky explain in The New Republic, right-wing affiliated polling firms are bragging that they’re behind the Trump polling bump.
It all went down in mid-September, at a time when the FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed the slightest of leads for Kamala Harris in North Carolina, a must-win state for Trump. Her edge was short-lived: The averages moved back to favoring Trump. And Quantus Insights, a GOP-friendly polling firm, took credit for this development. When a MAGA influencer celebrated the pro-Trump shift on X (formerly Twitter), Quantus’s account responded: “You’re welcome.”
The implication was clear. A Quantus poll had not only pushed the averages back to Trump; this was nakedly the whole point of releasing the poll in the first place.
Of course, the underlying goal of such poll rigging is simple: Create momentum which then gets press coverage and makes voters believe the election is shifting in favor of a candidate. Republicans have been doing it for years, but the last time they did so, it wound up biting them right on the ass.
Coming at a time when right-wing disinformation is soaring—and Trump’s most feverish ally, Elon Musk, is converting X into a bottomless sewer pit of MAGA-pilled electoral propaganda—these critics see all this as a hyper-emboldened version of what happened in 2022, when GOP polls flooded the polling averages and arguably helped make GOP Senate candidates appear stronger than they were, leading to much-vaunted predictions of a “red wave.” Most prominently, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg and data analyst Tom Bonier, who were skeptical of such predictions in 2022 and ultimately proved correct, are now warning that all this is happening again.
There was no 2022 “red wave,” and many of us were left wondering (as we did in 2016 when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton) how the polls could have been so wrong.
They were wrong because polls can easily be manipulated and often reflect the bias of the pollster conducting the poll.
Polling bias/rigging is now so ubiquitous (especially among conservatives) that it has become a default strategy for the 2024 Trump campaign, which knows Harris has more money to spend in the closing days of the campaign as real momentum (i.e. voters going to the polls) builds for Democrats. Republicans are desperate for a narrative to counter what they see happening on the ground.
In their telling, GOP data is serving an essential end of pro-Trump propaganda, which is heavily geared toward painting him as a formidable, “strong” figure whose triumph over the “weak” Kamala Harris is inevitable. This illusion is essential to Trump’s electoral strategy, goes this reading, and GOP-aligned data firms are concertedly attempting to build up that impression, both in the polling averages and in media coverage that is gravitationally influenced by it. They are also engaged in a data-driven psyop designed to spread a sense of doom among Democrats that the election is slipping away from them.
A data-driven psyop. In other words, it’s the sort of thing that’s done in Russia and other authoritarian countries: Repeating a lie so often that people start to believe it’s true.
Who is actually on the path to victory on November 5? A poll won’t tell you. That can only be determined by counting the ballots. So hang in there. We’ve only got 13 more days before the polls are utterly irrelevant.
