Fletch Daniels – The Democrat media, in conjunction with their allies in the polling industry, have driven the false narrative that the Democrats are likely to defy both history and their historically awful record and do fairly well in the midterms, particularly in Senate races.
To borrow a word from Mr. 10%, this has always been malarkey. We go through this same dance every cycle where the polls miraculously start to shift towards the Republicans in the last month, as polling outfits grudgingly start moving towards something resembling reality to avoid copious amounts of eggs on their face.
But, even at that, the polls during this cycle are likely the worst we’ve ever seen and the fault lies more with the administration than the polling industry. There is simply no way to accurately capture voting percentages when broad swaths of the country are hiding their views.
The alignment of the Democrat media, academia, the leftist government bureaucracy, social media, and entertainment industry into a cultural Death Star aimed at Republicans birthed the concept of the “shy” voters. In 2016, this phenomenon helped to explain how Republicans, to include President Trump, overperformed their polls.
But a lot has changed since 2016. Where voters might have once had concerns about how they would be perceived, they now know that the government and its cultural flying monkey minions view them as the enemy. The scales have fallen from their eyes. So, the shy voter has been replaced by the smart voter who has seen far too much evidence that the government is out to get him, or at least to monitor and silence him.
This noxious government has been leveraging all its resources and ideological allies to run both a terror campaign and a silencing campaign that would make some of history’s worst authoritarians blush.
The complete political weaponization of all the government agencies enabled the terror campaign, aimed squarely at even the most peaceful conservatives. Americans have watched Gestapo-like FBI raids and arrests against peaceful Christian pro-life protestors, complete with drawn guns and handcuffs, and have seen the FBI mobilized to intimidate concerned parents attending school board meetings. How many times in a week do Americans now say, “I never thought I’d see something like that in this country?”
They’ve seen January 6 protestors literally erased from society, thrown into cesspool-like prisons with no sense of due process, where they have been so mistreated that they’ve asked to be transferred to Guantanamo.
Conservative Americans know that nobody who draws the eye of Sauron will walk away unscathed even if they ultimately prevail in court, forced to spend all their time and resources trying to defend themselves against the tyrannical state. Even where the government and its handmaidens can’t use sympathetic judges and venues to destroy innocent lives, they will use the process to punish to send a very clear message.
Military members have been forced to sit through reeducation lectures and meetings on extremism in which a sizable number of the participants understood that the powers that be were far more concerned with them than any foreign terrorist or enemy state. Americans have watched as their family and friends have been fired for refusing to assent to tyranny.
They also watched the administration wink and nod at leftist violence, even when it threatened the lives of sitting Supreme Court justices. They watched an unprecedented political raid on a former president, meant to send the message that if even a president is not safe, imagine how easily we can go after you.
And, of course, they saw Mr. 10%’s fiery speech that appeared to be delivered from the gates of Hell where he demonized at least half of the country to such an extent that you could be forgiven if you thought you were watching Uncle Joe Stalin instead of Uncle Joe Biden, media-heralded uniter. It was the worst speech ever delivered by a U.S. president.
Americans grimaced when a government that hates them funded an army of 87,000 additional IRS agents to join the campaign. No matter how the administration spins that decision, Americans know that these agents are intended to be a brutal and terrifying weapon that will be wielded against them.
This intimidation campaign won’t stop conservatives from voting. If anything, it adds fuel to the fire. But it will result in many Americans taking a cautious view on talking to pollsters, regardless of how pollsters frame the questions.
The terror campaign has been aided by the parallel silencing campaign that has left very few conservatives untouched. Many Americans’ lives have been impacted directly by the silence campaign. Social media has become a “no conservative voices allowed” zone. My Twitter account was permanently banned with no reason given.
Clarice Feldman observed, “I do not know of a single conservative poster on Facebook right now who has not received warnings, had posts blocked, have had their feeds restricted until well after the midterms, or were outright banned.”
Because most people only see clearly what is happening to themselves, they don’t realize how universal the silencing campaign has been or how many people it has touched. But, far too many Americans have become conditioned to be very careful on sharing any opinion that isn’t approved by the leftist cultural commissars. They suspect they are being monitored and watched.
While the Obama administration put most of the tools in place, no administration in American history has so demonized and attacked Americans as this one. These intimidation and silencing campaigns make it impossible to accurately poll. Far too many Americans will not take part. While some polling companies are obviously better than others in finding ways to account for the missing voters, I don’t think even well-intentioned pollsters will be able to get the full picture within such a hostile environment.
The polls that are most valuable avoid mention of candidates and focus on less controversial issues. One worth noting was a recent Gallup poll in which 48% of Americans believe the Republican Party is best equipped to handle the issue most important to them, versus 37% who believed it was the Democrat party. While even a poll like this likely suffers from under-sampling conservatives, it is a better snapshot of the current environment than candidate-based surveys, which can be more easily twisted into accusations of extremist “wrong think.”
That number has to terrify Democrats, who always benefit from oversampling. That is an 11% gap — the kind of result that would be expected to produce some major surprises, which adds to my expectation that the Republicans will significantly outperform polls in the House while scooping up almost all the competitive Senate seats.
There is a noticeable lack of enthusiasm on the Left. Driving the streets around my Northern Virginia neighborhood, I see no Jennifer Wexton signs, where normally the Democrat candidate’s signs would dot the landscape by now next to the ironic “hate has no home here” signs. The race in my district, which isn’t even on the national radar, is going to be far closer than expected, and it would not surprise me a bit if underdog Republican Hung Cao, who would be a great congressman, wins that race.
In this environment where polls are likely to be so far off, I don’t think races that show a Republican up by a point or two (North Carolina, Wisconsin) are competitive. I also expect Republicans to win in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, and Georgia, and maybe even in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Washington. We will see how the polls magically “shift” over the next month, but I believe that any Democrat Senate candidate who is not ahead by at least four points come election day is in deep trouble.
When all is said and done, the Democrat media and political class will be left to figure out what went wrong, and how waging rhetorical and actual war on over half of the country was perhaps not the best strategy.
SF Source American Thinker Oct 2022