And now Trump has filed a fraud case against the Des Moines Register and their pollster who, days before the election, proclaimed that Harris had a 3 point lead in a State that Trump won by double digits.
Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of legacy media being nothing more, and nothing less, than the communication wing of the party of Democrats?
The pollster case seems less likely to succeed. Pollsters for years have overrepresented Democrat voters. And there is some evidence that the Harris campaign pumped money into Iowa that might have been better spent in battleground states after reading her polls.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
I'm not so sure . . . the poll published mere days before the election showed an abrupt shift, much larger than the margin of error, towards Harris at a time when she was losing momentum and falling behind in nearly every battleground State.
Such an outlier should have been examined closely before being published instead of rushed to publication if what is being sought is a true indication of public sentiment instead of a desired result. Was data manipulated to achieve a desired result that could end up giving Harris supporters in the battleground States a stronger incentive to vote in the election? If yes, was the publishing of the poll an attempt to influence election results in those battleground States and thus alter the outcome of the election?
Reasonable questions to ask given the disparity of the poll results and the election results a few days later. The only means of finding out the answer to that question is an independent examination of the raw data from the poll; and the only means of that being done is to file a lawsuit where discovery will shine a light on the manner in which the poll was conducted and analyzed.
I'm not willing to casually write this off given in each of the last 3 elections the polls materially underrepresented support for Trump during the campaign. Was such underrepresentation intentional in an effort to sway who would go to the polls and vote in the election? I can see nearly every poll getting it wrong in 2016, that was a unique election. One candidate with a lifetime of political experience versus one without any at all.
But the 2020 election where the incumbent is consistently trailing even in States where they have a strong support base? 538 had Trump up barely over a point in Texas of all places, where he ended up carrying the State by over 5 points. Trump outperformed every poll in every State in 2016, 2020, and 2024. I'm to believe that this is mere coincidence? There wasn't a single poll in any State that showed Trump leading by a larger margin than he actually ended up with? That Biden was projected to do better than he did in every single poll in every single State in 2020? That the same is true for Harris in 2024 and was almost universally true in 2016 as well? I'm supposed to swallow that down without giving it a very careful chew first? I don't think so . . .
