Will Americans let the pollsters decide for them?
by Robert Knight · The Washington TimesOPINION:
We keep getting harassed by pollsters. They call our cellphones, text us and send emails begging us to participate. We do not.
In the age of artificial intelligence, who knows where the information will go? We have no idea whether it is friend or foe doing the harvesting.
Many of our family and friends, mostly conservatives, feel the same. On the other hand, people of liberal bent are more likely to answer surveys, according to surveys.
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That is why I do not trust current polls about the midterms, which show Republicans behind in most contestable races.
Is Texas really going to elect blaspheming fake Christian James Talarico to the U.S. Senate because Ken Paxton has a messy divorce? I do not think so.
Eight years ago, the Democrats’ new blue hope, the preppy Beto O’Rourke, lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, and Mr. Talarico makes Mr. O’Rourke look like Chuck Norris.
Nor do I think that Michigan voters will send to the Senate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, a Democrat who has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the f-bomb-throwing, anti-American Islamist/communist.
Like Mr. Talarico, Mr. El-Sayed is bolting like a greyhound away from his leftist past. “Defund the police.” Who, me?
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Much of the Democratic Party, including Mr. El-Sayed, supports a socialist takeover of the healthcare industry via “Medicare for All.” They assure us that the federal government will run it as efficiently as, say, the federal government, which is rife with fraud and waste and has racked up a $40 trillion national debt.
Mr. El-Sayed was a strong supporter of the climate hysteria scheme known as the Green New Deal. His staff has been scrubbing online references to it, his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, rightly accused him of endangering Michigan’s auto industry — yet he beat her by less than 1 percentage point.
Republicans in Michigan have a strong Senate candidate in former Rep. Mike Rogers, who, among other things, has been outspoken against communist China’s espionage, cyberhacking, telecom security and Chinese investments in Michigan. He came within a whisker of winning the 2024 U.S. Senate race in Michigan, losing by less than 1% to Democrat Elissa Slotkin.
On a more general level, the media are ignoring the upsurge in Republican voter registrations over the past decade.
Announcing a voter registration initiative in January, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin acknowledged, “Between 2020 and ’24 alone, our party lost a combined 2.1 million registered voters. Meanwhile, Republicans gained 2.4 million voters.”
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In Pennsylvania, for instance, Democrats had a 916,000-voter advantage in 2016. But they now have an edge of only 206,000 in a state with 9 million registered voters.
Nevada, in which Democrats were ahead, has swung back to a Republican advantage. In Florida, Republicans have increased their lead to more than 1.5 million registrations.
In North Carolina, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats for the first time in 22 years, although independents account for the largest share of the electorate.
Democrat Roy Cooper, former governor of North Carolina, is counting on name recognition and tagging his Senate opponent, Michael Whatley, as a Trump insider. Mr. Whatley chaired the North Carolina Republican Party and the Republican National Committee. Most polls show Mr. Cooper leading.
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Mr. Whatley’s ads accuse Mr. Cooper of being soft on criminals and a career politician. So far, Mr. Whatley has not reminded voters about Mr. Cooper’s Achilles’ heel: his inexplicable embrace of the transgender agenda, which includes the medical mutilation of sexually confused children.
In July 2023, Mr. Cooper vetoed three bills from the Republican-led legislature. One bars biological males from girls’ and women’s high school and college sports teams. Another bans medical sexual transitions for minors. A third restricts gender identity content in early grades and requires officials to inform parents about children’s pronoun changes.
With public support surging on these issues, legislators easily overrode Mr. Cooper’s vetoes and made them law. This suggests that adding a Trump-style “they/them” ad in North Carolina might prove effective.
Meanwhile, day after day, the media keep unveiling polls that seem designed to discourage Republicans from voting. If there is no hope, why bother?
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Yet polls have been spectacularly wrong, and always against Republicans. In 1980, the polls had Ronald Reagan in a virtual tie with Jimmy Carter. Mr. Reagan won in a landslide, netting 489 electoral votes to Mr. Carter’s 49.
In 2024, polls showed former Vice President Kamala Harris slightly favored to win nationally and in several battleground states. President Trump won the popular vote and all seven battleground states and took 312 electoral votes.
Both parties must motivate their bases while convincing independents that they can be trusted to bring down gas prices, control crime, curb the cost of healthcare, keep the border secure, stand up to our enemies and resist — not abet — cultural rot. Democrats have no history of doing any of that. Quite the opposite.
In 2025, 9 out of 10 Muslim voters went for Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who is now New York City’s first Muslim/communist mayor. So did one-third of the city’s Jewish voters, in a shocking display of suicidal empathy.
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In Michigan, Mr. El-Sayed is counting on Muslims to vote heavily Democratic.
Still, if Christian voters outside Dearborn have even a slightly above average turnout, Mr. Rogers will win, no matter what the polls say. That would be the case for Republicans nationally as well.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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