Back in 2018, I launched a podcast very loosely tied to what I’ve done for a living for many years, and so I called it “Shaping Opinion.” The very first topic I sought to cover was how political polls are used to shape public opinion and influence the vote.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any takers who were willing to put themselves out there on this issue, and not just in that first year. This has always been one of those topics I’ve been ready to seize on if any new studies or indisputable proof would come up that would give me a chance to dig in. But no matter who I approached, people got awful shy on this one, especially after the presidential race of 2020.
Of course, this is one of those topics where you can trust your own eyes and ears, and your powers of observation over time. In every presidential election cycle, Democrats are over-sampled and Republicans are not. Pollsters say there are reasons for this, but they never tell the full truth.
You can count on public polls telling you early and often that the Democrat candidate is dominating. At some point around the conventions, polls will say each candidate saw a “post-convention bounce,” but the Republican candidate’s bump is always temporary and fleeting. The Democrat candidate’s bounce is always framed as the start of the home-stretch run where he or she is a likely winner.
This is to condition the voters into assuming the Democrat will win. Social psychologists often say that most people like a winner, so for many, once they have a sense from the polls who the likely winner will be, that’s who they decide to vote for.
Anyone with common sense who has seen this pattern over at least three election cycles can detect for themselves that polls are commonly used to shape opinion, not reflect it.
So last year, when a well-respected pollster from Iowa named J. Ann Selzer published her final numbers for “The Iowa Poll” three days before election day, many of us were extremely curious. She released what was the final Des Moines Register presidential election poll, which had Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three points.
Fox News called this a “shock poll” that “showed a seven-point shift from Trump to Harris from September, when he had a four-point lead over the vice president in the same poll.”
Hellbound and Down 