The Democrat/Media strategy for the lead up to and for the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election, is now clear:
- Incite a new panic about COVID-19, attempting to recreate the hysteria and dread that existed in the spring of this year.
- Simultaneously engineer polls showing a consistent and overwhelming lead for Joe Biden. Use these polls as “evidence” to discredit a potential Trump victory on election day.
COVID Panic (again) – As we mentioned in previous articles, there was reasonable justification for a certain amount of alarm about COVID-19 back in February of this year. We knew little about the virus at that point. There was scant knowledge on which therapeutics might work to specifically target COVID-19 and its symptoms. We didn’t have a large enough infected sample of the population to know which groups were going to be more vulnerable than others.1 While work had begun on a potential vaccine, there was no credible indication of when it might be available or if it was even possible to create one.
Our knowledge and ability to cope with the virus has changed dramatically since then. We know the answers to most of those previous unknowns about COVID-19. We know the profile of those most vulnerable to severe illness from the virus. We also know what segments of the population are unlikely to become severely ill or get sick at all. That information has sensibly informed a return to work and play in most states and a gradual relaxing of social restrictions where appropriate. We now have effective therapeutics – look no further than the quick recovery of the President himself after being infected. We have not one but multiple vaccine candidates in the final phase of human trials. Mass production has already begun for these vaccines, anticipating a successful and imminent conclusion to those trials.
While there is still cause for vigilance, there is no justification for panic. Nevertheless, Democrat leaders and the media are trying to incite a new COVID panic purely for political gain in these last few weeks before the election. Not only is this a repugnant tactic, it comes perilously close to being a form of domestic terrorism.2
One motivation for this new panic is to scare people into voting by mail or voting early. This sets up potential chaotic scenes within mail sorting rooms and endless ballot scrutiny by election judges. Another is to create a plausible reason to delay the Supreme Court confirmation process for Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Just this morning, Kamala Harris said that Senate Republicans are “endangering lives” by moving forward with confirmation hearings for Barrett.
We’ve also now seen how this has affected the Presidential debates. The President’s doctors cleared him to return to his normal schedule this past Friday. Despite the President being declared medically healthy six days before the next scheduled debate, the Commission on Debates insisted on changing to a virtual format. When the President stated this wasn’t necessary, the commission decided to cancel the debate altogether. There was no legitimate medical reason for this. The (feigned) show of viral fear served as a cover to protect Joe Biden from having to participate in an event where he demonstrably comes off as the weaker candidate.
Pre-Election Polls – We have a pragmatic view of opinion polling. On one hand, the general ability to measure public opinion by sampling just a small portion of the population (via a poll) is well supported in the science of statistics. We don’t dispute that science. However, without great care in how the poll is conducted, there are numerous ways the result can be biased, intentionally or unintentionally. Polls conducted on the race for President in the United States have an additional technical complication – we do not elect our President by way of majority opinion/preference. We use the mechanism of the electoral college instead. Thus, even a scientifically conducted national opinion poll, with all potential biases properly accounted for, will not necessarily predict the outcome of a US election.
To model the electoral college voting system in an opinion poll would be extremely expensive and complex. Separate polls would need to be conducted simultaneously in every state and US territory to mirror the electoral college math. Polls like this are rarely, if ever, done. Even so, a conventional poll, measuring simple majority opinion has proven prescient for Presidential elections most of the time. This is because in almost 90% of all US Presidential elections the popular vote and the electoral college produced the same winner. Until recently. Five times in United States history the candidate who won the popular vote did not win the electoral college. That includes two out of our last three Presidents.
The population of the country has been divided politically into roughly equal halves for some time. But the geographic distribution of voters on each side of the political divide has changed.3 Liberal/progressive voters have become clustered in a small number of populous states relative to their conservative counterparts (see the picture for this article). Of course, the primary goal of the electoral college voting system is to prevent a small number of states from dominating the election process. Thus, the odds of there being an electoral college winner who did not win the popular vote has increased greatly. The fact that this happened in both the 2000 and 2016 elections should not be a surprise to anyone. Those outcomes reasonably reflected the present-day geographic distribution of voters combined with the electoral college arithmetic. Absent a major shift in where liberal/progressive voters decide to live, it stands to reason the next several Presidential elections may turn out the same way.
Many Presidential election polls do consider the geographic location of the respondent in their methodology (by including more responses from populous areas). While this makes sense for local elections, it doesn’t for Presidential elections. The electoral college system intentionally blunts the influence of populous states for the selection of a President. This is not the case for any other elected office in the United States. Ignoring this distinction and treating a Presidential election poll the same as a poll for a Senate, House, or Governor’s seat is a deception. The President’s opponents have already telegraphed their intent to use this intentionally misleading poll data to setup a future claim that a Trump victory on election day must be fraudulent. These polls will serve as proof that the true preference of the electorate, which must mirror the polling data, is buried in millions of unopened mail-in votes. That assertion will justify long delays in the counting process, exponentially increasing the opportunity for foul play.
It is instructive to recognize how the public views the credibility of the media organizations that are creating, interpreting, and reporting these poll results. Independent pollsters conduct surveys that measure the integrity and believability of these media companies. For example, the Gallop organization conducted a poll in August of this year and found that 54% of all Americans believe news reporters are “misrepresenting the facts”. That same poll finds that 84% of Americans believe news media reporting is biased. Given these numbers, how much stock should be put in an election poll conducted by these same major media organizations (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Washington Post, etc.)?
Will the combined deceptions of a new COVID panic and contrived polling data succeed in affecting the election outcome? We have faith that most Americans see through all this. The electorate was fooled once in 2016 with a fake story about Russians colluding with Trump to affect the election outcome. Voters now have their radar turned up high.
1As it turned out, it would have been a big mistake to assume COVID-19 had a similar profile to our other recent pandemic experience, Swine Flu (which hit young children the hardest).
2Here are quotes contained in a CNN article on 10/12/2020:
- “By February, the coronavirus death toll in the US could double to about 400,000” – from a model done by the University of Washington. This is the same modeling group that predicted 20% of the US population (68 million people) would be infected by the end of the year. That’s about 10 times the number of infections we currently have.
- “An additional 20,000 Covid-19 deaths by the end of the month are inevitable” – an unnamed former CDC director.
- “Public health experts have warned that the fall and winter could bring an explosion of new Covid-19 cases” – unnamed public health experts
- “Infections are now on the rise across several US regions and experts warn the number of cases is far too high, ahead of what’s forecast to be a challenging — and deadly — winter season.” – CNN writer
3In the 32 years between 1984 and 2016, the population of California grew by 51%. However, in that same time period, the number of Californians who voted for the Democrat candidate in Presidential elections increased by a whopping 123%.