And So It Begins: Claims About Fake Polling Are About to Be Tested

By Brian Cates

For the past several months, as the polls have shown former President of the United States Donald J. Trump amassing a historically significant lead over his rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, claims have been advanced that this Trump lead is not really as large as the polls show.

Claiming the pollsters have gotten it wrong is nothing new in political races. Pollsters do, in fact, make errors, such as when almost every pollster back in 2016 had former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton handily defeating Trump for the Presidency.

But there is a marked difference between a pollster being off by 5-6 pts in the actual outcome of an electoral contest, and advancing the claim before the voting starts that the majority of the pollsters are wrong by 25 pts or more.

As the lines diverged markedly in the polling starting in the Summer of last year as Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s numbers dropped precipitously as Trump’s numbers continued to climb dramatically, in some quarters of the news media the claim began to be advanced that perhaps the polls are not just wrong, but drastically wrong about how the GOP race for the nomination has been unfolding.

Nobody wants to admit that they’re about to not only lose a race for the nomination, but they’re about to lose by massively historical margins.

And so, for the past few months the DeSantis campaign and its supporters have been floating the idea that the polls are not only wrong, they are drastically wrong. Some DeSantis supporters continue to insist Trump’s big lead is a Fake News Media creation, an illusion crafted to dispirit and discourage many non-Trump or non-MAGA voters from showing up at the polls. 

After all, why bother to show up and cast your vote for someone else when Trump has it all locked up anyway, this kind of thinking goes.

The great thing about time is that it cures most illusions.  Many clever illusions can’t be sustained for a long amount of time, the real world has a nasty habit of breaking the surface and destroying the ‘magic’.

And today is the day the claim that the polls are way off gets its first solid test, as Iowans head to their caucuses tonight. At last we are going to get to see if there really is anything to this claim that the pollsters have been casting an illusion with their massive Trump leads for the past several months.

One thing that can’t be argued is that nothing has really gone the way the GOP establishment had hoped over the past year. The idea was that Trump would be mired in endless lawfare persecution after multiple indictments and arrests and this would cause his base to begin abandoning him.’

Not only has that not happened, the more over-the-top unconstitutional lawfare that was rolled out against Trump, the higher he climbed in the polls.

None of the GOP establishment donors dumping their money into Ron’s campaign could’ve possibly imagined a year ago that they’d end up watching DeSantis burn through $100 million only to end up fighting Nikki Haley for a very distant second place in Iowa.

But that’s what will happen tonight.