“My observation is that when Trump began polling consistently ahead of Biden with an increasing lead, then polls began to emerge showing just the opposite as if trying to tamp down the run-away aspect of the race. Almost as if a call went out” – The current top comment on a PJ Media opinion-ish piece titled “Need Help Figuring Out When Not to Trust a Poll?” the first of not one but two articles Friday by PJ’s Matt Margolis sweating a Franklin and Marshall College survey finding Biden up by 10 points over Trump in a head-to-head in Pennsylvania – but by a probably more realistic 2 percent when Robert F Kennedy Jr and the other Russian assets are included in the field.
And damn. If the MAGA kids didn’t have circular logic then they’d have no logic at all, right? Like maybe give him credit for finding a marginally less basic way of saying simply “I believe the favorable poll numbers but not the unfavorable ones,” but that’s, uh, pretty much what he’s saying.
It is definitely true that “Trump began polling consistently ahead of Biden” in September 2023 or so after leading fairly comfortably in whatever head-to-head matchups were tested before then. We really have no idea what the hell happened other than that was the month that it seemed like pollsters got bored of asking about the fat bastard’s criminal indictments and instead started to focus on Biden’s age. That cannot be the sole reason though and it’s largely pointless to dwell on.
This is the hand we’ve been dealt four years after cheering poll after poll showing Biden with double-digit general election leads nationally and we’re playing it with an unhealthy dose of motivated reasoning and selective coverage on top of tiresome, insincere caveats for that motivated reasoning and selective coverage. It’s working out great for us, and is certainly a far more effective method of coping than the one employed by the anxious souls in the PJ Media comments.
We’ve already been through the wringer on this horserace shit and as such it does not matter quantitatively if some of the polls are shifting toward Biden. Of course we’ll still pick up the increasingly favorable numbers just as a fun “fuck you” to the same MSM and MAGA media cocksuckers who spent the last six months cheerfuly declaring Biden’s reelection and thus American democracy to be doomed. But we’re not going any further than that with “unskewing.”
Probably. Never say never.
What we won’t be doing is coping by coming up with shit like “Almost as if a call went out.” Unless it’s RealClearPolitics rigging their average to make it more favorable to Trump.