LoD 119: Polls Don’t Lie (but maybe pollsters do)[1]

Copyright (c), 2016, 2025 Thomas Kratman

This one’s from the 2016 election, written in August of that year. I think I called it pretty well.

*******

"We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means."

– Clausewitz, On War

It ought also be obvious to the intelligent reader that the other side of that coin is likewise true, that, while war is a continuation of politics, equally politics is a continuation of war, in our case, domestic politics are a kind of civil war.

The aphorism, that “Truth is the first casualty of war,” is variously attributed to Aeschylus, Samuel Johnson, Hiram Johnson, Arthur Ponsonby, Phillip Snowden (or his wife), and God alone knows how many others. It doesn’t matter who said it, really; it, too, is obviously true.

So we’re in a continuous war for the soul of America and we’re going to take things presented by those who think or feel they have a personal or philosophical stake in that war at face value? That’s absurd.

And so, to the polls. We’ve all seen Donald Trump’s fairly impressive post-convention bounce, as reflected in polls, disappear and go into deeply negative numbers versus the Hildebeast (Or have they? More on that below). You’ve also probably seen my advice, from last week about how you might consider voting if you’re in a safe Trump state or a safe state for Monica Lewinski’s boyfriend’s wife.[2]

But what if you can’t know? What if the polls are being fudged, and maybe badly, because the media is determined to make the news rather than report it, determined to remake the world in accordance with their most adolescent fantasies? This may be happening.

Why would they fudge numbers like that? It might be to demoralize the non-left wing opposition, especially the Republican Party workers. (I say “non-left wing” because, Bubba, Trump is neither a conservative nor a right winger; he’s a populist.) It might be to drive corporate donors to buy influence from Hillary, now, at the IPO rate, since they probably can’t buy much with Trump, now or later. I don’t think, by the way, that I have a damned thing to do with it; I’m just not that important.[3] But it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some of them see what I’ve seen that I told you about last week; short version: In swing states voting your conscience or your disgust might see the White House china and furniture disappearing again, to say nothing of civil war.[4] It might even be because to them, the media, the journalists, the more left wing of pollsters, the words, the numbers, and the illusions they create are the reality, with no objective reality beyond them. A real cynic, which, of course, I am not, might wonder if some of them aren’t looking to make padded vote counts, where the all-important Democratic Party-supporting block of dead people and living goldfish vote straight Stalinist-in-Birkenstock ticket, look more credible.