Why Republican Pollsters and Prognosticators were Proved Wrong by the People
How “News Analysts” repeatedly try to demoralize progressives in electoral politics and left-of-center activism
By
David Gottfried
I despise Donald Trump. But I agree with one thing he said: The system is rigged. However, he was wrong about who it is rigged against. The system is rigged against the poor and oppressed and those who try to fight for the poor and oppressed.
In the midterm elections, the Republicans were supposed to gain about 50 seats in the House, probably take the Senate, unseat Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and Patricia Murray in Washington, and were, supposedly, on the verge of casting New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul into the devilish depths of electoral ignominy. Maggie Hassan, Murray and Hochul won with sizable majorities, GOP gains in the House were scant and that tenacious, compelling, Pennsylvania lumberjack of a guy, John Fetterman (He reminds me of one of my favorite movies, “The Deer Hunter” ) will be a member of the United States Senate.
I don’t think the predictions of a “Red Wave” were accidental. Throughout my life, I have witnessed myriad ways in which slanted news coverage and Polling has been used to discount, undercount and devalue liberal and left-of-center strength. In this essay, I will note primaries and elections in which liberal strength was underestimated, or plainly lied about, presumably to make liberals give up, not campaign, not contribute money and not vote. I will also cite ways in which the anti-Vietnam war movement in the Sixties, and AIDS activism in the eighties and nineties, received warped and distorted coverage, presumably so the fresh air they breathed into the body politic would be snuffed out and strangled to death.
1) The fabrications of pollsters, from 1936 to the Present:
A) In 1936, “The American Literary Digest” rose to the rooftops and announced that it had a new, “scientific” tool which enabled it to figure out who would win the presidential election of 1936. They told us that their brilliant poll had determined that the Republican Candidate, Alf Landon, would win. In fact, Franklyn Roosevelt won in a landslide, winning every state in the nation save Maine and Vermont. There was a reason (carefully obscured from the great majority of people who heard the poll) why the poll was so wrong. They only polled people who owned telephones or cars and most poor people in those days had neither.
B) When Truman ran for President in 1948, the press had been so successful in disseminating a spirit of dejection and defeat among Democrats that even some of the delegates at the Democratic convention carried signs ridiculing Harry Truman, such as “I’m just mild about Harry” and “To err is Truman.”
The media elites were so certain the Truman would lose that at least one paper published a headline announcing that Truman’s GOP opponent had won. Although most Americans today have fond thoughts of Roosevelt and Truman and their progressive programs to fight for working people, at the time, the overwhelming majority of the owners of newspapers and other media outlets were adamantly, stubbornly Republican. To these Neanderthal gluttons of privilege, social security was a socialist scandal, and they did everything they could to return America to the control of the high-hatted Tzars of Wall Street and their reign of Republican recalcitrance and unremitting cruelty to the poor.
C) In 1968, when Senator Eugene McCarthy started his presidential campaign premised on his bold opposition to the War in Vietnam, the news media treated him as a joke. The idea of opposing a war we were fighting was considered not only rebellious but also quasi criminal. After all, Senator Joe Mc Carthy had been putting people away for leftist associations, contending that they were “premature anti-fascists” and had been un-American for working with Communists to stop Hitler back in the 1930’s. The major news outlets told us that because opposition to the Vietnam War was the province of grizzled, drug-addicted hippies, Gene McCarthy would get 10 percent of the vote -- at most 15 percent of the vote — in the New Hampshire primary. In fact, he got 42 percent of the vote.
D) On the Friday immediately before New York’s Democratic Presidential Primary in 1980, the New York Post blared with a headline stating that Carter was 20 points ahead of Ted Kennedy. In fact, Ted Kennedy won the New York primary by 18 points.
E) In 1986, when progressive Mark Green challenged the incumbent senator from New York, Alphonse Damato, the polls routinely said that Mark Green’s campaign was “hopeless.” If my memory is correct, polls said Green was 20 points behind. Consequently, his supporters were demoralized, his workers would not hit the streets to win converts, fundraising dried-up and many people did not bother to vote. If the media hadn’t kept saying that he would lose by 20 points, maybe he would not have lost by 8 points, and maybe he would have won.
F) One or two days after the Iowa Democratic Caucuses in January 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story which noted that when the Caucuses were over, newsman slapped each other on the back for having written slanted stories which unfairly covered Howard Dean’s campaign, premised on opposition to the Iraq war, effectively destroying Howard Dean’s candidacy.
Howard Dean was the gutsiest contender against Bush in 2004. After the media did its dirty work, John Kerry won the nomination, and the Republicans ate Kerry for lunch. Shortly after the 2004 election, right-wing Grover Norquist was quoted by the Times as having said that he liked Democrats who had learned to behave like docile, “neutered farm animals.”
G) In Michael Blumberg’s last re-election campaign for the mayoralty of New York City, some people speculated as to why he was spending so much money on the campaign as the polls had him way out in front. On election night, he won, but he won barely. In fact, from the time 50 percent of the vote was tabulated, until the time when about 75 percent of the vote had been tabulated, his Democratic challenger led him in the count.
Although the populace were fed false polls, which showed Blumberg way ahead, Blumberg’s private and more accurate polls showed that the race was very tight because liberal New Yorkers were becoming more left wing because income inequality had become intolerable. Had Blumberg’s opposition not been smothered with lying polls which underscored the futility of progressive resistance to Blumberg, the liberal opposition could have raised more money, gotten more people to contribute time to the campaign and gotten more voters to the polls.
In the 2022 midterms, the media not only gave us a barrage of reports which inflated Republican strength, but also harangued us with a deluge of stupid stories which evinced an abysmal knowledge of politics. I am referring to stories that went like this:
“The polls show that people are concerned about inflation and are not interested in threats to Democracy. Therefore, Biden and the Dems should not talk about threats to our democracy. The dems should just follow the polls and “talk about” inflation.” (And many of these stories wrongly suggested that Biden was the cause of our inflation.)
Per the logic of these idiotic stories, Winston Churchill and Franklyn Roosevelt should not have talked about the necessity of fighting Hitler because so many Americans and Britons were isolationist. Of course, the great majority of these imbecilic “talking heads” have no concept of statesmanship. A statesman has the moral mooring which prompts him to follow that which he thinks is true and good and not be a slavish follower of every stupid poll discussed on the stupid news. A persuasive Statesmen will ultimately convince his constituents to change their views.
2) The Warped Reporting of Opposition to the Vietnam War.
I was rather consumed by politics, starting at about age 10, and I was attending anti-Vietnam war demonstrations when I was 12.
I lived in Brooklyn, New York, on 77th Street and Fourth Avenue, and the front door of my apartment house was less than one block away from the R train (In those days called the RR train). In 45 minutes, the RR train had me in Times Square. (In January 1972, at the age of 14, I was working at Mc Govern’s New York State Headquarters, transmitting election materials from Washington D.C. to New Hampshire for that state’s legendary primary)
In any event, I learned from attending anti war protests, and from other people in the movement, that the news media routinely cut crowd estimates, at demonstrations, by one half. If they thought 100,000 people went to a protest, they would smugly report that 50,000 people went to a protest. Without fail, the media also called attention to everything that was funny or fey or grotesque or criminal. Every aspect of determined and sincere protest was buried, and the “liberal” media painted us as a bunch of acid heads with long hair and no manners who lacked the requisite courage to slaughter Vietnamese villagers in America’s jihad against communism.
The Media’s Unforgivable Failure to Tell the Truth About ACT-UP
I was affiliated with ACT-UP (The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) on and off from the inception of the organization until the 1990’s.
I worked most intensively with the group in 1992. (I was sent by the New York chapter to Houston to raise hell at the 1992 Republican convention. I am the man responsible for dying the fountains of Houston red, to symbolize the blood of AIDS patients. I never was a runner, but when the police chased me, I think I must have broken a few records in the sport.)
ACT UP was, I think, the most committed, fervent, gutsy organization that existed at any time, in the United State, since the end of the Vietnam era and the civil rights protests of the 1960s.
Most of what we went through was not reported by the media. We had scores of demonstrations in which dozens of people were regularly arrested and thrown into paddy wagons. I knew a guy, who was about 5 foot 7 and 120 pounds, who was beaten by about 10 cops (pigs is a better term) who severely wounded him and caused permanent brain damage, resulting in a long hospital stay.
Practically none of this was covered by the miserable media. Tipper Gore would get a full court press whenever she was in the mood to rant about rock music’s alleged perversity, and the media never tired of discussing Bill Clinton’s girlfriends, or a diva’s outfit at the academy awards, but the mass death caused by AIDS, the scant funds being spent toward finding meds to combat AIDS, and the bloodthirsty response of lawless enforcement to demonstrators was not considered important.
I did see some coverage of AIDS on comedic programs on TV. I saw one show which presented ACT UP as a clique of queens who passed the time screaming in tinny, high voices. I heard Andrew Dice Clay lambast AIDS patients and “homos” on Saturday Night Live.
The cast of Saturday Night Live used to have private parties in a building near the Spike and Eagle Bars in the days when those bars were situated on 11th Avenue. One night, when I was drunk, I simply harassed partygoers affiliated with that god forsaken awful TV program which could always be counted on to air the most boring and unfunny jokes.
When I think of Saturday Night Live and other mediocre platforms for “comedy,” I recall what Lillian Hellman said about the comics of her day in “An Unfinished Woman,” (1969):
“The 1920’s rebels always seemed strange to me: without charity I thought most of them a classy lot of brilliant comics, performing at low fees for the society rich. The new radicalism is what I had always been looking for.”