Pollster investigates inaccurate 2020 election polls4

A series of inaccurate polls that consistently favored Kamala Harris and liberal issues in the 2024 election show that mainstream pollsters are “mouthpieces for the government” and for the corporate giants that own their networks, according to a pollster who predicted the outcome of accurately predicted the elections.

Opinion polls from traditional media consistently presented the Harris-Walz campaign as rising and possibly poised to win the White House on Tuesday. In reality, Donald Trump won 31 states and defeated Harris in the popular vote – a first for a Republican presidential candidate in two decades. Still, NBC News and ABC News reported a three-point lead for Harris entering Election Day, from 49% to 46%. CBS News polls showed the 2024 presidential race tied. On the other hand, Rasmussen Reports predicted a 2.4% lead for Trump. What explains such divergent opinion polls?

“Opinion polls are satisfied. And when your pollsters all report to organizations owned by major corporations that have an interest in ensuring that the status quo of DC’s corporate oligarchy maintains its control, then that’s what happens. They are literally mouthpieces for the government, and I have proven that they are for the Democrats,” Mark Mitchell, chief researcher for Rasmussen Reports, told Washington Watch with Tony Perkins on Wednesday.

“We caught them. They absolutely cooked the internal elements of the polls because the exit polls show that who ended up voting is nothing like what was in ABC polls, NBC polls, Reuters and Ipsos – not at all.”

ABC News reported that the most important issue for voters in 2024 was protecting democracy from incipient fascism. That was followed by the economy, which kept abortion legal and granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, the network said.

“The state of democracy narrowly prevailed as the most important issue for voters of the five tested in the exit polls,” ABC News claimed, citing its own election night exit polls. “Thirty-five percent of voters considered this their most important issue, followed by 31% who said it was the economy, 14% who said abortion, 11% immigration and 4% foreign policy.”

“Legal abortion gains majority support in all seven swing states, increasing from 60% to 69%,” ABC News claimed. It also claimed that 57% of voters in 2024 said illegal immigrants should not be deported but should instead be “given the opportunity to apply for legal status,” despite polls showing almost that exact number (54%) of Americans support mass deportations.

That wasn’t right with Mitchell. “I’ve never seen that” constellation of issues rising to the top of the 2024 election, Mitchell told Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “The No. 1 issue has always been the economy in our polls, and the exit polls bear that out. And then No. 2 is the border, but it doesn’t really reflect the pain that people feel just talking about the border.”

Voters believe that “America is in a much, much worse position after the Biden administration,” Mitchell said. “Only 37% of voters said they are better off than they were four years ago. Only 27% of voters in swing states say they are safer than they were four years ago.” And only about 1 in 5 voters said that “today’s children will be better off than their parents.”

“That’s absolutely devastating,” Mitchell said. “So when they talk about the border and the economy, they say to you: stop the invasion; bring back the middle class. Because the Democrats, in my opinion, killed it.”

ABC News has buried the news about voters’ economic woes. “The economy remains an important source of irritation. Voters say things are in bad shape 67%-32%. And 45% say their own financial situation is worse now than it was four years ago, compared to 30% the same, with just 24% doing better. The ‘worse off’ figure exceeds 2008 levels of 42%, and easily surpasses its shares in 2020 (20%) and 2016 (28%),” according to the exit polls.

“With a different hand of cards, (Harris) might have won this thing,” Mitchell said. “But she is the status quo candidate, and people hate the status quo.”

Still, pollster Ann Selzer had a last-minute poll that would show Harris winning the reliably Republican state of Iowa.

That was “probably the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened in the industry,” Mitchell said. Selzer “can certainly interrogate Iowa because she has done it cycle after cycle.” And she even did a poll in July and Trump was at 18. Trump finished at 14, but she posted a Harris plus three result just before Election Day, just to satisfy the Democratic need for good news.”

“She burned her credibility,” Mitchell said.

“The traditional media and their pollsters should not have an ounce of credibility,” Perkins said.

Mitchell praised the work of Rasmussen pollsters, with one exception. His firm “underestimated the huge Republican turnout” in Texas. “If you take that out, our error drops to 0.2% in the United States. Eleven of the fourteen states we hit were within the margin of error.”

Overall, he agreed that the political landscape had realigned in 2024, with a multiracial working class supporting Trump and suburban social liberals shifting to the Democratic Party.

The 2024 election saw “middle-class people fleeing the Democratic Party,” he noted. “There are some compensations. There are upper class suburban women and Boomer men who watch MSNBC. Those people are more inclined towards Harris.”

Meanwhile, “the Republicans, the Donald Trump movement, are really starting to become the core of the counterculture.”

But the realignment of the United States is “entirely based on reforming the Republican Party around the MAGA agenda. Because voters overwhelmingly think the Republican Party is the party of Trump and the MAGA movement.”

“The MAGA principles are very popular,” says Mitchell. But since “Trump can no longer run,” the survival of an America First agenda within the Republican Party “remains to be seen.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand