A series of inaccurate polls that consistently favored Kamala Harris and liberal issues in the 2024 election shows that mainstream pollsters are “mouthpieces for the government” and for the corporate behemoths who own their networks, a pollster who accurately predicted the election’s outcome has said.
Polls from the legacy media consistently presented the Harris-Walz campaign as surging and possibly poised to win the White House on Tuesday. In reality, Donald Trump won 31 states and bested Harris in the popular vote—a first for a Republican presidential candidate in two decades. Yet NBC News and ABC News reported a three-point lead for Harris going into Election Day, 49% to 46%. CBS News polls showed the 2024 presidential race tied. On the other hand, Rasmussen Reports forecasted a 2.4% lead for Trump. What explains such disparate poll results?
“Polling is content. And when your pollsters all report up to organizations that are owned by massive corporations that have vested interests in making sure that the corporate oligarchy status quo in D.C. maintains its control, that’s what happens. They are literally mouthpieces for the government, and I’ve proven that they shill for Democrats,” Mark Mitchell, chief pollster of Rasmussen Reports, told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Wednesday.
“We caught them. They absolutely cooked the internals of the polls, because the exit polling is showing that who turned out to vote is nothing like what was in ABC polls, NBC polls, Reuters, Ipsos—not at all.”
ABC News reported that the most important issue to voters in 2024 was protecting democracy from incipient fascism. That was followed by the economy, keeping abortion legal, and granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, the network stated.
“The state of democracy narrowly prevailed as the most important issue to voters out of five tested in the exit polls,” claimed ABC News, citing its own exit polls on election night. “Thirty-five percent of voters ranked it as their top issue, followed by 31% who said the economy, 14% who said abortion, 11% who said immigration and 4% who said foreign policy.”
“Legal abortion wins majority backing in all seven swing states from 60% to 69%,” ABC News asserted. It also claimed 57% of 2024 voters said illegal immigrants should not be deported but instead “should be offered a chance to apply for legal status,” despite polls showing nearly that exact number (54%) of Americans support mass deportations.
That did not ring true with Mitchell. “I’ve never seen that” constellation of issues rise to the top of the 2024 election, Mitchell told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “The No. 1 issue has always been the economy in our polling, and the exit polling is confirming that. And then No. 2 is the border—but it doesn’t really capture the pain that people are feeling just talking about the border.”
Voters feel that “America is in a much, much worse place after the Biden administration,” said Mitchell. “Only 37% of voters said they’re better off than they were four years ago. Only 27% of voters in the swing states say they’re safer than there were four years ago.” And only about 1 in 5 voters said that “today’s children will be better off than their parents.”
“That’s absolutely horrible,” said Mitchell. “So, when they talk about the border and the economy, they’re telling you: Stop the invasion; bring back the middle class. Because the Democrats, in my opinion, killed it.”
ABC News buried news of the voters’ economic anguish. “The economy remains a key irritant. Voters say it’s in bad shape by 67%-32%. And 45% say their own financial situation is worse now than four years ago, versus 30% the same, with just 24% doing better. The ‘worse off’ number exceeds its 2008 level, then 42%, and far outpaces its shares in 2020 (20%) and 2016 (28%),” said its exit polling.
“With a different hand of cards, [Harris] might actually have won this thing,” said Mitchell. “But she is the status quo candidate, and people hate the status quo.”
Yet pollster Ann Selzer had a last-minute poll supposedly showing Harris winning the reliably Republican state of Iowa.
That was “probably the most ridiculous thing that ever happened in the industry,” said Mitchell. Selzer “can definitely poll Iowa, because she’s been doing it cycle after cycle. And she even polled it in July and had Trump up 18. Trump finished at 14, but she put up a Harris plus-three result right on the weekend before election day, just to satiate the Democrat need for some kind of good news.”
“She burned her credibility,” said Mitchell.
“The legacy media and their pollsters should not have a shred of credibility,” said Perkins.
Mitchell touted the work of Rasmussen pollsters, with one exception. His firm “underestimated the massive Republican turnout” in Texas. “If you take that one out, our error goes down to 0.2% in the states. Eleven out of the 14 states we hit within the margin of error.”
In all, he agreed the political landscape had realigned in 2024, with a multiracial working-class supporting Trump and suburban social liberals shifting to the Democratic Party.
The 2024 election showed middle-class “people fleeing the Democrat Party,” he noted. “There are some offsets. There are the upper-class suburban women and the Boomer men who watch MSNBC. Those people are breaking more towards Harris.”
Meanwhile, “the Republicans, the Donald Trump movement, are really starting to become the core of the counterculture.”
But the realignment of the United States is “all predicated on the Republican Party reforming around the MAGA agenda. Because voters overwhelmingly think the Republican Party is the party of Trump and the MAGA movement.”
“The MAGA tenets are very popular,” said Mitchell. But since “Trump can’t run again,” the persistence of an America First agenda in the GOP “has yet to be seen.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
