The polls have been in the news lately because Democrats are celebrating the lead Biden appears to hold while Republicans are worried that the Wuhan virus lockdowns and Black Lives Matters riots will harm Trump. Three news items, however, illustrate just how meaningless polls are in modern politics.

The first item is the most worrying: According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll, 67% of Americans disapprove of what Trump has done regarding the Wuhan Virus. Yikes!

Interestingly, the poll methodology does not say how the poll was weighted between Republicans and Democrats. It says only that it oversampled blacks and Hispanic respondents. Make of that what you will.

This is the same kind of scary poll that had Biden with a “double-digit advantage on President Trump” in a national poll. What most people miss is that America doesn’t have national elections. America has 50 state elections plus the District of Columbia. That’s different.

Still, the poll is disturbing for a specific reason. Some leftists have figured out that the Electoral College matters. They need to do what Trump did (and Hillary didn’t) in 2016, which is to target Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Bradley Beychok, a representative from the Democrat super PAC American Bridge 21st Century recently boasted at USA Today that the PAC is working on convincing voters that Trump ruined the economy, which has been his consistent strength. They intend to do that by attacking his Wuhan virus response:

Among the swing voters who will help decide this election, President Trump still maintains a significant advantage over presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden on the question of who is best suited to lead America out of this economic crisis. If we want to ensure that Trump does not win a second term, we need to cut off the last leg of his reelection bid. 

It’s the economy, Democrats. 

Before COVID-19, Trump was planning to stake his reelection on a roaring economy, and he would have had a semi-legitimate — albeit extremely flawed — argument to make. Now, we’re in a recession and nearly 50 million people have filed unemployment claims.

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That’s why, over the past year, American Bridge 21st Century, the organization I lead, has been hyper-targeting white working class voters on economic issues in three states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — who backed President Barack Obama and then switched to Trump in 2016. At American Bridge, we are dedicated to weakening Trump’s standing on economic issues by relentlessly attacking his egregious record and hammering home the fact that his disastrous leadership has led us into a recession.

It doesn’t matter that Trump was extraordinary on the economy. It doesn’t matter that it was Democrat states that enacted panicked lockdowns followed by race riots that weakened the economy. It doesn’t matter that the economy survived only because, during the preceding three years, Trump had created a solid foundation. It doesn’t matter that the economy is roaring back. And it doesn’t matter that Trump responded quickly and effectively to the virus within the constraints of federalism. What matters is micro- and hyper-targeting people to sell them a lie.

Part of selling the lie is through polls. Push polls encourage people to take positions without intending too. This Yes, Minister moment explains perfectly how push polls work:

Still, as Lincoln is alleged to have said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” The question is whether this modern media age has changed that rule, so that the American people can be fooled all the time.

At least one Democrat politician doesn’t think they can be. Elissa Slotkin, a congresswoman from Michigan and a former CIA analyst, believes that the polls (presumably including the push polls) are creating a narrative as false as that in 2016:

“I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”

The problem, as Al Quinlan, an honest pollster finally told her, is that Trump voters avoid the polls:

“He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”

What we have to hope for is that, in 2020, as in 2016, enthusiasm counts. Trump voters have voted in overwhelming numbers in uncontested primaries, while Biden voters are lukewarm, to say the least. A professor whose incredibly accurate model is based upon primary turnouts thinks this gives Trump a 91% chance of winning – but of course, that 91% chance becomes a reality only if people show up on election day and overwhelm the anticipated vote fraud.

Image: Pxfuel