Team Trump know they have lost. They have known for a while. They are not playing to win. They’re playing to steal the election.
During the past week alone, they have released as many fake polls—75 in total, created not to reflect public opinion but to serve a political purpose—as they have during the entire period since Kamala Harris officially became the Democratic candidate..
These polls are not intended to have an effect on the outcome of the election. Rather, their purpose is to tee up Big Lie 2.0, Trump’s argument that he was ahead, the polls showed it and that any Harris victory has to be the result of cheating.
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While such polls are costly, estimates suggest that tens of millions have been spent on politically-biased purpose polls during the course of this campaign, and require an enormous amount of coordination, they are by no means the only part of the extensive effort by Trump, his campaign, the MAGA GOP and the enemy governments who are supporting their efforts to lay the groundwork for a massive series of challenges to the 2024 election results.
These challenges have included everything from Trump social media posts this past week suggesting that Pennsylvania election officials are rigging the election against him, to scores of lawsuits across the country seeking to get voters stripped from voting rolls (which will provide important fodder for future claims to delay certification)—or, as in the case of Georgia, to stop the state from processing ballots from drop boxes to the spread of disinformation about the elections (including fictitious stories created, peddled and promoted by Russian intelligence).
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has designated the people behind the purpose polls as “red wave” pollsters because some of them were behind the misperception that Republicans would do far better than they did in the 2022 election. He asserts that such pollsters dropped 17 polls on Sunday alone and at least 75 during the past week. His estimate it is that something like 125 such polls have been circulated since August.
He also counts “prediction markets” like Polymarket, funded by Trump supporters like Peter Thiel, as part of this overall effort to create a misperception about the state of the campaign and to “shape the election narrative for Trump.”
Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer tweeted on this phenomenon, “When Republicans lose on Tuesday they‘ll be shocked bc all the polls they paid for promised them they’d win. That‘s a feature, not a bug, you the ’flood the zone’ strategy Rs are using. They need people expect to win to get them to commit felonies for Trump.”
Both The New York Times and The New Republic have reported on aspects of what the right is doing with these polls, but the implications and intent of the GOP initiative has gotten neither the attention nor traction they warrant.
Rosenberg gets specific when he makes the case about these pollsters and the overall effort to pollute and distort the public’s perception of what is happening.
For example, he observes, “TIPP, the pollster who has been doing a daily tracking poll and played a major role in tipping all the averages and forecasters to Trump has as its corporate slogan, “talent on loan from God”—Rush Limbaugh’s tag line.“ He also urges voters to “just look at their website—it is far right fever dream stuff.”
As for the emergence of Polymarket, he says, “This is a very serious issue. It is an off-shore crypto company funded by Thiel and has spent enormous sums of money spreading their pro-Trump betting market as a legit window into the election. They are a very bad new actor in all of this and what most people don’t realize is that not only is the company not American but despite the amount of publicity the market gets, no American can trade the presidential stuff on their platform legally.”
The authorities should be aware of such foreign actors, and the ties some of them—like Elon Musk—have to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. There should be a similar awareness of the activity of Russian intelligence in the marketplace, and the fact that some of the work done for Trump by entities like Polymarket (or Twitter) may constitute illegally in-kind or foreign campaign contributions. When this election is over, if Trump’s efforts are rebuffed, major investigations by both the intelligence community and the Department of Justice are clearly called for.
Despite such corrupt initiatives and their origins, major polling averages that are used by mainstream media regularly, have incorporated the results from this partisan pollsters into the averages they tout daily. It is intellectually and methodologically dishonest and it is deeply misleading. Those who’ve sold the averages as gospel or even credible are guilty of the worst sort of journalistic malpractice.
The recent surge in this activity, of course, has not been enough to counter the reality that the momentum is with the Harris campaign. Independent polls (like the Iowa Selzer poll) are showing this. Turnout among groups that are seen to be trending pro-Harris—notably women—is also showing this. Currently, with over 75 million votes already cast, women represent eight percent more of the electorate than do men.
That is among the hard data reasons that Republicans are already moving on to Plan B. Trump has prefaced every election effort with a face-saving argument that the polls are rigged against him. But as we saw since the election in 2020, Trump and his team have made their post-campaign strategies even more central to their efforts than has been the traditional business of running for president and seeking to win the support of voters the old-fashioned way.
In fact, the GOP plan, like Trump in 2021, views the will of the people as a distraction to be overcome. Knowing they can’t win on Election Day, they are seeking to win in the courts, with the aid of political leaders including those in the Congress, and, if necessary, as on Jan. 6, through acts of violence. They are desperate. They will do anything to win. And if that undoes democracy in America, that’s just fine as that has been their overall goal from the beginning.
