Posted on 08/31/2026 4:29:51 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The venerable Dick Morris this week revealed that the manipulation of polling data goes even deeper than many of us thought.
We’ve all been long aware (though many tend to ignore it in practice) that the polls have been corrupted to the point of worthlessness. It has become standard among many (myself among them) to add 3 to 5% to all poll results for the GOP – the higher the better, usually – which in many cases gives totals very close to real-world results. This was reinforced this summer by the scandals involving primary poll results involving Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed, who was given double-digit leads in the Michigan Democrat senatorial primary but barely eked out a 1% victory, and the Florida Democrat senatorial primary, in which ex-military hustler Alexander Vindman held a polling lead of nearly twenty points but lost to socialist Angie Nixon by 12 points. Only world-class naivety can excuse dependence on polls from this point on.
But it’s not only results. There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and the pollsters have used considerable ingenuity in assuring that numbers say the right things about the right people.
Morris, who could look healthier, reports on a study by Patrick Ruffini at Echelon Insights. Ruffini analyzed the results of several hundred polls taken during congressional election campaigns over the years. He discovered that pollsters have been regularly overstating the numbers for Democrat candidates in the months leading up to the election, with emphasis on the summer months. Then, during the final weeks of the campaign, the pollsters carefully “ratchet back” their results, bringing them into sync with the actual voter sentiment going into election day. “They’re wrong in July and August,” Dick tells us, “then they get more and more correct as September and
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
this was almost certainly true up until this year. But I have a bad feeling about this November unless Trump wipes out Iran and they surrender between now and then.
Yep.
Yup.
“Morris, who could look healthier…”
That’s a bit gratuitous, though accurate. He appears frequently on Newsmax, and looks like hell. Beyond that, I agree with you. “Venerable,” my eye
Polls always oversample Democrats. Plus a poll taken during the weekend is usually inaccurate, people are usually not a home during the weekend.
Meaning?
GOP trailing in 8 battleground Senate races 2 months before Election Day: polling aggregate
-PJ
I have MUCH less enthusiasm for Republicans than usual. I will still vote Republican, but won’t door knock or call potential voters. The primary reasons? No passing the Save America Act, Mitch McConnell’s lack of proof-of-life, and Ukraine/Iran involvement.
I well remember a well-known poll giving Hillary Clinton over a “90% chance of winning” - the day before the 2016 POTUS election:
“Hillary Clinton was given a 90% chance of winning the 2016 presidential election by the final Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation poll, released on November 7, 2016, the day before Election Day.”
And Kamala Harris was “Up by three points over Trump in Iowa” the weekend before the election:
“Kamala Harris led Donald Trump 47% to 44% in the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released on November 2, 2024, just three days before Election Day.”
Trump won Iowa by 13 points.
Believe polls at your own risk.
We need to hire pollsters to ask our questions:
Over the last 60 years which communist country DO YOU FEEL has starved to death more of their own citizens: Cuba? North Korea? Or China?
Did you ever feel communists would run for office AND BE ELECTED in the United States of America?
How likely are you to vote for a communist/socialists running as a democrat?
Between Biden and Kamala who do you feel was the most corrupt? Stupid? Or offensive?
Look back to the 2012 election and the discussion on this site around polls and a website that proclaimed to unskew them to remove the bias in the results which shifted everything to the right (unskewedpolls, Dean Chambers).
Except the results mirrored the polls and the site owner fully admitted they were entirely wrong. But for months this site was all about unskewing the polls to show the right was really winning.
Polls used to be fairly accurate, but nowadays I don’t put much stock in them at all.
Did Morris is almost always wrong in his predictions. Does anyone actually pay him for his Comments?
The reason they do it is to make us think we are outnumbered.
That way we’ll support RINO candidates in order to win enough Democrat crossovers to make up the difference.
Any poll before Labor Day is worthless. A large part of the public is on vacation.
Registered Voters polls always favors the Dems.
“polls that confirm my own preferences. All the others are enemy psyops.”
Well said. Properly run polls can be invaluable to candidates seeking info on how to package their message.
I have conducted polls where I ask the same question of government policy in several different ways. On foreign policy, on life/abortion, on taxes and economic freedom I can get widely different results based on how the question is worded....and very importantly how the 2 or 3 questions prior to the “REAL” question set up the context for the real question.
A current example: GA R candidate for Senate Collins talks about “cost”. D Ossoff talks about “price”. In the context of their ads they are the same thing. But the D ad is communicates with the voter much more than the Republican ad due to the choice of this one word.
“Or alternatively, “I only believe polls that confirm my own preferences. All the others are enemy psyops.””
That should be the final word on the subject, because it’s 100% true. Or 110% true in the case of the emotionally fragile.
Interesting. I can see the Dims pay much more attention to the words they use and the names things are called.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.