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Trump isn’t playing to win the election, he’s planning to steal it
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Trump isn’t playing to win the election, he’s planning to steal it

Team Trump knows they lost. They’ve known for a while. They don’t play to win. They are playing to steal the election.

In the past week alone, they have released as many fake polls — 75 polls designed not to reflect public opinion but to serve a political purpose — as in the entire period since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee.

These polls are not intended to influence the outcome of the elections. Rather, their goal is to break Big Lie 2.0, Trump’s argument that he was ahead, the polls showed, and that any Harris victory must be the result of cheating.

While such polls are expensive, estimates suggest that tens of millions have been spent on politically biased polls over the course of this campaign, and that they require a tremendous amount of coordination. They are certainly not the only part of Trump’s comprehensive effort. , his campaign, the MAGA GOP, and the hostile administrations supporting their efforts to lay the groundwork for a massive series of challenges to the 2024 election results.

These challenges include everything from Trump’s social media posts over the past week suggesting Pennsylvania election officials are rigging the election against him, to dozens of lawsuits across the country seeking to purge voters from their voting rolls (which is important fodder future claims against delaying certification) – or, as in the case of Georgia, to prevent the state from processing mail-in ballots and spreading disinformation about the election (including fictional stories created by Russian intelligence conceived, distributed and promoted).

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has labeled the people behind the target polls as “red wave” pollsters, saying some of them were behind the misconception that Republicans would do much better than in the 2022 election. He claims that such pollsters alone dropped 17 polls on Sunday and at least 75 last week. His estimate is that about 125 such polls have been distributed since August.

He also sees “prediction markets” like Polymarket, funded by Trump supporters like Peter Thiel, as part of this overall effort to create a misconception about the state of the campaign and to “shape the election narrative for Trump.” .

Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Lancaster Airport on November 3, 2024 in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Lancaster Airport on November 3, 2024 in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer tweeted about this phenomenon: “If Republicans lose on Tuesday they will be shocked because all the polls they paid for promised they would win. That’s a feature, not a bug, that you use in the ‘flood the zone’ strategy that uses Rs. They need people who expect to win so they can commit crimes for Trump.”

Both The New York Times And The New Republic have reported on aspects of what the right is doing with these polls, but the implications and intentions of the Republican initiative have received neither the attention nor the traction they deserve.

Rosenberg gets specific when discussing these pollsters and the overall attempt to pollute and distort the public’s perception of what is happening.

For example, he notes: “TIPP, the daily pollster that has been instrumental in pushing all the averages and forecasters toward Trump, has as its corporate slogan ‘talent borrowed from God’ – Rush Limbaugh’s tag. line.” He also urges voters to “just look at their website – it’s far-right fever dream stuff.”

Donald Trump attends the 2024 Senior Club Championship awards ceremony at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., March 24, 2024.
Marco Bello/Reuters

About the rise of Polymarket, he says: “This is a very serious issue. It is an offshore crypto company funded by Thiel and has spent vast sums of money spreading their pro-Trump gambling market as a legitimate window into the election. They are a very bad new player in all of this and what most people don’t realize is that not only is the company not American, but despite the amount of publicity the market gets, no American can legally sell the presidential stuff on their platform trading. ”

Authorities should be aware of such foreign actors, and the ties some of them – such as Elon Musk – have with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. There should be a similar awareness of Russian intelligence services’ activities in the marketplace, and of the fact that some of the work done for Trump by entities like Polymarket (or Twitter) may be illegal in-kind or foreign campaign contributions. If this election is over and Trump’s efforts are rejected, there is clearly a need for major investigation by both the intelligence community and the Justice Department.

Despite such corrupt initiatives and their origins, major poll averages regularly used by the mainstream media have incorporated the results of these partisan pollsters into the averages they tout daily. It is intellectually and methodologically dishonest and deeply misleading. Those who have sold the averages as gospel or even as credible are guilty of the worst form of journalistic malpractice.

They are desperate. They will do anything to win.

David Rothkopf

The recent increase in this activity has obviously not been enough to counter the reality that the Harris campaign has momentum. Independent polls (like the Iowa Selzer poll) show this. The turnout among groups perceived to be pro-Harris trends – particularly women – also shows this. Currently, with more than 75 million votes cast, women represent eight percent more of the electorate than men.

That’s one of the hard numbers why Republicans are already moving to Plan B. Trump has prefaced every election effort with a face-saving argument that the polls are rigged against him. But as we’ve seen since the 2020 election, Trump and his team have made their post-campaign strategies even more central to their efforts than the traditional business of running for president and trying to win voter support the old-fashioned way. win. .

In fact, the Republican plan, like Trump in 2021, views the will of the people as a distraction that must be overcome. Knowing they cannot win on Election Day, they are trying to win in court, with the help of political leaders, including those in Congress, and, if necessary, as on January 6, through acts of violence. They are desperate. They will do anything to win. And if that destroys democracy in America, that’s fine, because that’s been their overall goal from the beginning.