It’s true; it is a changing world. Streaming services are out-performing cable news and traditional media, meaning centralized content control is gone. So when you hear the crazy nonsense that Republicans are in trouble for this upcoming November elections, you can attribute that to election shenanigans rather than accurate and truthful information. I told you there would be lots of crazy stuff that Democrats would try between the summer of 2022 and Election Day in November, and this idea that Trump Republicans are polling behind their Democrat Rivals, especially the J.D. Vance race in Ohio and the Oz race in Pennsylvania is simply smoking crack. America is not a leftist nation, and neither are many of the states in flyover country. Only an election that cheats massively could see positive results between John Fetterman, an open socialist who wants to legalize hard drugs for recreational use, and Dr. Oz, the famous television personality with Trump’s backing. I would call them both liberal candidates, just as Kari Lake in Arizona has been a liberal. And Donald Trump used to be a Democrat. Who thinks that moderates will pick Fetterman over Oz when given a choice and a regulated election that doesn’t allow for cheating due to Covid rules made up on a napkin? Nobody, yet we are supposed to believe by a dying, propaganda media that Fetterman is ahead in some polling in a head-to-head matchup with Dr. Oz. No way.
It’s the old tricks again, but this is a changing world of citizen media and podcasts. People are turning away from traditional media, more out of connivance and options, and moving toward their own kind of media support that is much more catered to them. Fox News is part of that old media machine where it was all about the politics of the horse race, and the name of the game was to raise money and spend it on media in the crazy belief that money spent meant races won. But Trump proved that his rival could outspend him, but if you had the right message, you could win over a bad message all the time, and that cat is now out of the bag. The good political advisors already know what many in public don’t want to admit; the game is over. Dollars spent do not win elections, which means the Fox News model of scaring people, selling people more drugs from big pharma, then getting politicians to buy air time to reach those scared voters is a thing of the past. And the problem there is that the means to polling data that are collected to feed that beast is designed around that fundamental business model. Scare an audience, sell airtime to them, and whoever has the most airtime wins the race. Of course, the media has been pushing that narrative. But that’s also why people increasingly do not trust them. Instead, they are turning to their own forms of media to get information making podcasts the preferred means of getting information. Cable news, network news, and newspapers are no longer the primary means of reaching an audience.
Polling was more accurate because pollsters knew where to find people to ask for reliable results. A few years ago, pre-Trump, pollsters knew who Republicans were, who Democrats were, what shows they watched, and how they voted in the last election. They could call people on a hard line at dinner, and someone would usually pick up the phone. Now pollsters aren’t so sure who they are calling, they only have cell numbers, but Republicans don’t pick up the phone to unknown numbers at near the same rate as Democrats do. When they do get someone who might have voted for Democrats traditionally, they are now turning toward Trump. So when a media company like ABC News or NBC, who certainly want an outcome that steers the world back to traditional politics and media control, needs polling data to support their position, where do they turn? Well, they are calling known Democrats who still pick up the phone and are in their phone banks as consumers of traditional media. But Trump Republicans are coming from all over the place; they are those who don’t pick up the phone so quickly and long ago moved to new media for their news. They are likely to be immigrants who don’t want what happened in the countries they are running from to occur in America, so they are voting Republican, but not Democrat. But they aren’t being called because traditional media thought those people were just going to vote Democrat anyway, by default.
And to make matters worse, Trump has many new media that emphatically support him, like his own social media platform, Truth Social, or the Warroom-driven, Gettr, which has millions of very active users. Twitter has lost its previous power, as has Facebook. Where it used to be hard to tell who conservatives or liberals in social media were, but now it’s been clearly divided. Conservatives have moved entirely away from media sources that have shown political activism against them and are now somewhere else, where pollsters aren’t sure how to reach in a sample of 1000. So, the data ends up top-heavy by liberals because the pollsters don’t know how else to populate it with conservative input.
You can hear the fear in their voices, especially on MSNBC and Fox News. They must believe that Trump is a liability to candidates like J.D. Vance and Dr. Oz, and that Democrats will trend ahead naturally because the nation doesn’t like Trump and are upset still about January 6th, and that Trump insists the elections of 2020 were stolen. Auuuh, most people believe that the elections were stolen in 2020 and many elections before. And people could care less about what happened on January 6th. If anything, many people mutter under their breath, “they had it coming.” They may not admit that in public, and they certainly won’t answer a phone call from a stranger on the matter saying so. But when they are among themselves, they are cheering on Trump to stick it to the machine that wants to imprison them with more corrupt politics and a government that represents globalism, not their backyard needs. So the polling is unreliable because the conductors of the information have a pre-conceived outcome that they are noticeably endorsing for their own survival. It’s the wrong information from the start. They assume that Trump is bad and anybody else is good, so they seek the information to fill that reality. And are avoiding the results that will take them to the real answers they don’t want to know. So what we end up hearing from them on news reports is that Democrats are poised to do well against Trump-backed candidates because the actual name of the game is to protect their advertising dollars from traditional candidates who still believe money spent are races won. And hope for the best. Because for them, the end is near. The world is changing rapidly, and they aren’t ready for that change. So they really have no choice in the matter but to hope to bluff their way to their own survival. Because when it comes time to admit they were wrong all along, they probably won’t be around to report it.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 