The real reason the Republicans are now trying to manipulate the midterm polling averages
The majority of polls released in the past week are commissioned by Republican politicians and/or Republican strategists, and are designed to (falsely) show a GOP landslide. There are always a handful of these kinds of “fake polls” and they just get averaged out, but now there are so many of them that they’re dominating the averages. So why is the GOP doing this?
The GOP knows that the mainstream media and the polling aggregators will give free publicity to any “professionally conducted” poll, even if it’s clearly just a Republican stunt. The polling analysts are too earnest and don’t like arbitrarily eliminating any polls. The media is too thirsty and loves hyping shock polls for ratings.
So the GOP knows that by flooding the zone with commissioned polls that claim to show the GOP with huge momentum, the media and the polling aggregators will turn right around and dutifully push the narrative that the GOP indeed has huge momentum. It’s all about creating that false narrative.
People are less likely to turn out and vote for their side if they’re told that the other side has momentum and has pulled ahead and will win no matter what. People are more likely to turn out and vote for their side if they’re told their side has momentum and can win it all with their vote. So this tidal wave of fake polls showing the Republicans with huge momentum is, in fact, an attempt at voter suppression.
There is also another aspect, and it’s based on the notion of con artists conning other con artists. Let’s say you’re a Republican strategist and your candidate has a strong chance of losing. If you commission a poll with two weeks to go that shows you ahead, and then you lose, you and your candidate can then make the argument that it was “rigged” against you.
Obviously the “it was rigged against me” argument gets you nowhere in terms of actually winning. Not one candidate has ever lost an election and then been magically named the winner as a result of yelling “it was rigged against me!” But such false narratives are useful in other ways.
If you’re a Republican candidate with a fragile ego, you can use these commissioned polls to tell yourself you didn’t really lose. And if you’re a Republican strategist with a dumb candidate, you can convince them you did a great job for them and it was just stolen from them.
Of course this stuff only works to the extent that the media is willing to go along with presenting these kinds of “fake polls” as if they were real. So naturally, some major news outlets are seizing the opportunity to chase ratings by hyping these obviously illegitimate polls.
Some major polling analysts, to their credit, are now making a point of spelling out that the majority of the latest polls are Republican stunt polls. But most of the public listens to the mainstream media, not to polling statisticians.
So what’s the solution? The Democrats could crank out their own commissioned polls designed to falsely show them with momentum – but you don’t fight disinformation by ramping up the disinformation. And given how useful the polling averages have traditionally been at identifying which races are competitive and which races need resources, the “ignore the polls entirely” crowd is still as wrong as ever.
For the next week we are going to need to actively weed out commissioned polls and internal polls from the polling averages if we’re going to find any useful information at all in there about how best to steer our last minute resources. But after the midterms we’re going to need a reckoning on all of this. Polling analysts will need to stop including Republican-commissioned polls in their averages. The media will need to stop reporting on Republican-commissioned polls entirely. And that won’t happen unless we push them into it.
In the meantime, the Senate and House races that are competitive down the stretch are the same races that were competitive a week or two ago, before the polling averages were hijacked. The key is to keep putting in the work on those races. Phone bank, knock on doors, drive people to the polls, and volunteer in other ways to help drive turnout. Voting is already well underway. “Activism” means you have to find a way to volunteer now. Yes, you! Let’s go win this!
