Here come the junk polls, scare tactics and other things you’ll have to spend this final month watching out for
Everyone knows that the final polls and expert predictions were laughably out of whack in the 2022 election cycle. But what’s remarkable is that until the final fateful month of that election cycle, the polls and predictions had been largely on track. What we were seeing predicted as late as August and September of 2022 is pretty much what the results ended up looking like. It was just that everything went off the rails that final month – and not by accident.
In the final month of the 2022 election cycle, Republicans and their allies began commissioning and releasing what can only be described as partisan junk polls. These polls were skewed in a way that made it look like the Republicans were performing better than they were. The obvious goal was to discourage activists on our side and convince us to give up, rather than spending the final month putting in the work required to win.
It also had the side effect of making the legitimate polls (which we’ll define as the polls that at least try to get it right) start to question their own results, and sure enough, some of those legitimate pollsters got baited into shifting their methodology toward the Republicans down the stretch in 2022. This in turn baited some of the most accurate nonpartisan forecasters into shifting their predictions in the Republicans’ favor. And of course the media (on both sides) couldn’t resist the opportunity to spend that final month yelling “red wave” every five minutes. They had to know that it wasn’t accurate, but they knew they’d have deniability. When the “red wave” never happened, the media could just blame the experts. The experts could just blame the legitimate polls. And the legitimate polls could blame the junk polls.
So why the Wednesday morning history lesson on the 2022 election? Because here we are in the final month of the 2024 election, and at least some of the above is starting to happen again. The Republican junk polls are starting to come out in full force, especially in presidential swing states like Pennsylvania and in senate swing states like Montana. Once again, the Republicans and their allies are trying to trick us into believing we’re going to lose certain states no matter what, so we’ll give up trying, which will make it easier for the Republicans to win. We are, of course, not going to fall for it. But some others seem to be falling for it already.
Yesterday a normally reliable nonpartisan race rating outlet downgraded a Senate race and two House races, seemingly based on nothing more than junk polls (this same outlet made the same mistake in 2022 but doesn’t appear to have learned from it). And we all know how eagerly the media is going to play this up. We’re about to hear that the sky is falling, Kamala Harris is in trouble, the House and Senate are lost, and here comes another red wave.
But again, we all know better. If you were part of the Palmer Report community in 2022, you knew not to fall for it when everyone else went out of their minds with defeatist fear in the final month of the election. You knew to keep focusing on the most competitive states and races. You knew to keep putting in the work instead of listening to the “we’re gonna lose” types. And sure enough, the Democrats ended up winning a large majority of the House and Senate “toss up” races that we focused on.
So let’s make sure we do the same thing again here in the final month of the 2024 election. Nothing about this election has changed over the past week, other than the amount of empty noise that the Republicans have managed to whip up by playing games with the polls. All we have to do is stay focused and keep working with our eyes on the prize, and we’ll win in 2024. Donate now
