From the time that Donald Trump farted and clanked his way down that rattletrap escalator in Dump Tower, he was a national joke. In bad taste. But from the start, he had a loyal 35% base of unrepentant lowlife losers that ensured him the nomination in the GOP.
Then came the general election. And as I have written repeatedly, people who Monday morning quarterbacked by bitching about the late national polling were off base. For the most part, the final week polls from the reputable national polls nailed it. They had the basic final percentages spot on, with Clinton winning by a couple of points. But what the national polls didn’t show, because it’s not their job, is micro-polling swing districts in battleground states that ultimately gave Traitor Tot the electoral college.
So what went wrong? In a simple acronym, GIGO Garbage In Garbage Out. Any poll is only as good as the honesty of the people answering the poll. And in suburban and exurban areas across the country, the pollsters, doing their best, ran up against a wall of bullsh*t.
This was the vaunted Trump Ghost Army. It turned out that while Traitor Tot had a reliable, rock solid base of about 35% who didn’t care who knew it. There were others. Trump was after all an ass clown, an embarrassment to intelligent folks everywhere. But there turned out to be a soft underbelly of disaffected soft GOP, soft Democratic, and independent voters who were fed up with the whole political process. And who knows? Maybe what the country really needed was a bold, brash, racist New York billionaire to hit DC like a hammer and get it going again. But that doesn’t mean that they wanted their family, friends, neighbors and coworkers laughing their asses off at them. So they lied the pollsters. And they put Trump over the top.
Which brings us to 2024, and the shoe is on the other foot. In 2016 moderate, sane voters were embarrassed to admit that they backed a total sh*theel like Trump, so they kept it to themselves. But by 2018 most of them had already realized their mistake, and quietly pulled back their support for Trump without anybody knowing. And by 2020, the disaffected Democrat, GOP, and independent Trump tree was pretty well bare. Winter had come to Trumptopia.
But then came 2020. And after it January 6th, 2021. And some of those soft GOP, Democratic, and independent voters who came out of the closet in support of Trump in 2016 learned that when the devil calls in his loan, he collects souls for interest.
They saw the carnage January 6th, and saw that the true nature of the Trump base was. And they saw the terrible manhandling of Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shea Moss, the AR-15 armed mobs gathered outside of the houses of Michigan Democrats and GOP House Speaker Rusty Bauer in Arizona.
And quickly realized that this might not be the time to publicly jump off of the Trump Train. These motherf*ckers are crazy, and they have the firepower to prove it. They quietly either stayed home or secretly voted for Democrats in 2022, avoiding a GOP wave.
And now we’re in 2024. Trump is thrice indicted, due to be four times indicted next week, and his base is feral. Which is why I think that there’s trouble for Trump in the upcoming GOP primaries. A poll released this week of GOP Iowa voters showed Trump with 54% support. But the same poll showed that 46% of Iowa GOP voters had open minds, and were willing to consider other candidates. This is not the kind of a reception the owner of the GOP wants going into a primary. And remember that Trump actually lost the 2016 primaries to Ted Cruz.
Watch out for Trump’s 2024 ghost army. They lied to the pollsters in 2016 out of embarrassment in 2016, but will they either sit out or vote against Trump in secret in 2024? The polls are only as good as the honesty of the respondents. And somehow or other, Trump supporters, especially weak ones, don’t strike me as a bunch of stand up guys.
Pollsters are in for a rough time. I think you’re on to something about 2016 voters who lied because they didn’t want others to know they supported Trump. He’s held on to a certain percentage of that original MAGA base but elections since then prove some of that 2016 support was soft. What’s weird now and will make pollster’s lives miserable isn’t trying to figure out the percentage of people lying about support for Trump. To some degree they’ve learned to account for that. The problem is those who once enthusiastically voted for him (even if they didn’t want to admit it outside the voting booth) who are angry with him. Because he didn’t build that wall and make Mexico pay for it. He didn’t bring China to heel. He didn’t “drain the swamp.” They didn’t have 4k extra at the end of the year after his tax cut. And so on. So, they still want the 2016 Trump they “know” will do those things (and more) but Trump didn’t get it done, or enough of what they believed he’d promised them he’d do done. And that’s the problem. There’s maybe more of those angry 2016 voters now than there were then. They might do what “Christian” conservatives had done a couple of times since Reagan activated them and just stay home. Or they might vote for someone else. Or they might decide when it’s time to vote to give Trump one more chance because they’ll think about all his talk about being persecuted. But that given another chance he’ll be able to finish what he started. There are lots of troubling signs for him to be sure. Rally attendance is way down. Donations seems to be dwindling too. However there are still a lot of angry folks out there and once we’re past the conventions and it’s a one on one race (hopefully No Labels won’t wind up fielding a candidate after all) there are tens of millions who’d vote for Satan before they’d even consider voting for a Democrat. “Owning the libs” has become their purpose for living and even if they’re angry at, or have lost faith in Trump there’s no way in hell they’ll vote for Biden or any other Democrat. The question will be whether they’ll just stay home or if Trump can motivate them to vote (for him of course) if only as a means of sticking it to liberals.
Polling firms lost all credibility in the 2016 election. Anymore, when I see polls I just assume they’re back-asswards.
I hope anyone who was stupid enough to support former guy in 2016, remembers at the very least the pandemic before even remotely considering the azz-clown for prez again. I hope is complete incompetence during that health crisis really sends out the red flags to those people. We cannot afford to have him or anyone like him in the oval ever again. Unfortunately for our country, we have a$$-clowns like trump in the voting pool so we might be well and truly f*cked.
Actually, that “secret army” had a precedent–back in 1992 in Colorado.
That was the year in which the state had an amendment on the ballot which would ban any state or municipal protections being afforded to LGBTQ individuals (and would revoke any such protections already in force). Well, most polling before the election showed the amendment would fail–one poll taken shortly before the election showed it would fail by 52-42–but election results showed quite the opposite with the amendment passing with 53% of the vote. The amendment’s opponents tried to figure out how the polling could’ve been so wrong and the only thing they could determine was that people lied to the pollsters so they wouldn’t be “judged” for their apparent bigotry and, based on the disparity, it would seem that roughly 20% of the Colorado electorate were concerned about how a bunch of pollsters would judge their responses. The only other real option that would make sense was that a lot of the amendment’s opponents were lulled into a false sense of security and therefore didn’t get out and actually vote; when your side is leading by 10 points with just a 6 percentage point of “undecideds,” you would feel less need to vote–even though that’s an absolutely short-sighted way of viewing things (this could’ve also been a factor in Hillary’s 2016 loss–because the polls showed her with such a comfortable lead, her “soft” supporters or “disaffected” Bernie supporters might’ve felt okay with voting for a third party candidate or not voting at all).
Doesn’t this just prove that the only valuable polling is the actual election?!?
My adopted daughter’s biological mother voted for Trump in 2016. When my daughter and I visited her in NJ, we went to breakfast, and I learned the above fact. I asked her if she still supported him,(this was before 2020). She emphatically said no. I asked why she voted for him and now she doesn’t. She’s not a politically savvy person. She’s working class with a high school education. She said she believed he was the self made billionaire from the Apprentice, and bought all his rhetoric. After watching him in action, she said she was embarrassed she voted for such a horrible person. That breakfast discussion gives me hope. A lot of good hearted people got taken in by the TV personality. Some, have smartened up to the reality. I told her I was proud of her for admitting he was a mistake. Some prodigal children never return. She did, and I pray millions more come around because, they do want to do the right thing. Time to separate the wheat from the chaff in the time left before our last great chance to turn this thing around. The democrats need to get bold in broadcasting their achievements and how the guns over people party is out for all our destruction. Facts matter. They always have and always will, whether the human species remains, or goes extinct, as did all the other hominids in our family tree. VOTE.
I spent 30 minutes,researching and writing a rebuttal to a Georgia guy who claimed GA was liberal.now and his proof was Biden won and they have two Democratic Senators. I pointed out how much they learned in 2920and how carefully they watched in 2022. The Georgia,House and Senate have worked overtime plugging up.those holes, to the point of making it illegal for anyone but a poll.worker to hand someone in line a bottle of water but no laws,restricting carrying a,weapon near a polling place which should imho should be ilkegal.as a form of voter intimidation I went through the laws limiting where and when you can vote,,mostly affecting PoC, working poor, the elderly, and students.
He seemed to.lose it when I said Dragon on was overpriced,,for-profit but depending on volunteers who weren’t even given free membership and only kicked out the cofounder who.is,a convicted pedophile when it went national.and could affect their profit
Grrrrrrrrrrr
Two things happened in 2016. One was the disillusioned voters from all parties as Murfster says. To them, Donald ran a reality show and did good at it. What they didn’t get is that Trump had very little to do with the success of that moron fest. I never did watch it because I already knew Trump was a career criminal and I couldn’t bring myself to watch anything that was tied to that much stupidity that these people were going to take advice from a clown who was a draft dodger idiot that had gone bankrupt six times and hung out with gangsters.
Now we could have survived that but we had the second part of the equation and this is the part that pisses me off to this day. This part to me is almost worse than Donald Trump. You have the so called progressives. Now I believe that everyone is entitled to have a shot at the mike. Now all these progressive idiots had supported Bernie Sanders like ticks. Then good old Bernie lost to Hillary. Bernie and Hillary were cool 😎 with it. But all those people that supported Bernie decided they would rather not vote at all than vote for Hillary. I don’t get it. Hillary took Trump down at every turn. She is a very smart woman. And you would have Bill in the background. To me that’s a win win. But these chauvinistic a$$holes weren’t having it. And that’s what gave us the worst president in our entire history. That’s why I wish to do whatever I can to stop this tragedy before this clown can get anywhere near that dam White House.
I hear you Chris. I had to point out to my young, college educated, neighbor he voted for Trump when he cast his vote for Jill stein. He said it was a protest vote. I called him on the fallacy of that entire bullsh*t. Of course, he had swallowed some crap about Hillary. He is indicative of a lot of misguided intent.