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

Team Trump knows they lost. They've known this for some time. 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 that do not reflect public opinion but serve a political purpose – as in the entire period since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee.

These surveys are not intended to have any influence on the outcome of the election. Rather, their purpose is to reinforce Big Lie 2.0, Trump's argument that he is ahead, the polls show it, and that any Harris victory must be the result of fraud.

While such polls are costly, estimates suggest that tens of millions have been spent on politically biased polls over the course of this election campaign and require a tremendous amount of coordination. But they are by no means the only part of the extensive effort by Trump, his campaign, the MAGA GOP and the hostile governments supporting their efforts to lay the groundwork for a massive series of challenges to the 2024 election results.

Those challenges have included everything from Trump social media posts last week in which he suggested election officials in Pennsylvania were rigging the election against him to numerous lawsuits across the country aimed at removing voters from the rolls to delete (which will provide important basis for future claims). delaying certification) – or, as in the case of Georgia, preventing the state from processing ballots from mailboxes and spreading disinformation about the election (including fictional stories created, distributed and promoted by Russian intelligence).

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg has called the people behind the targeted polls “red wave” pollsters because some of them were behind the false assumption that Republicans would do far better than them in the 2022 election. He claims such pollsters lost 17 polls on Sunday alone and at least 75 polls last week. He estimates that around 125 such surveys have been in circulation since August.

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

Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer tweeted about this phenomenon: “If the Republicans lose on Tuesday they will be shocked because all the polls they paid for promised them they would win.” That's a feature, not a bug, They use the “Flooding the Zone” strategy using Rs. They need people who expect them to win to get them to 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 GOP initiative have not received the attention or traction they deserve.

Rosenberg gets specific when he talks about these pollsters and the overall effort to contaminate and distort the public perception of what is happening.

For example, he notes: “TIP, the pollster who conducts a daily tracking poll and has been instrumental in making all the averages and forecasters favor Trump, has as its corporate slogan “Talent on loan from God” – Rush Limbaugh's catchphrase line.” He also urges voters to “just look at their website – it’s the right-wing extremist’s dream.”

On the creation of Polymarket, he says: “This is a very serious problem.” It is an offshore crypto company financed by Thiel that has spent enormous sums of money to promote its pro-Trump betting 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 is receiving, no American has the presidential material on its platform can act legally. ”

Authorities should be aware of these foreign actors and what ties some of them – like Elon Musk – have to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. There should be similar awareness of Russian intelligence activity in the market and the fact that some of the work done for Trump by companies like Polymarket (or Twitter) may be illegal in-kind contributions or foreign campaign contributions. If this election is over and Trump's efforts are rebuffed, comprehensive investigations by both the intelligence community and the Justice Department will clearly be necessary.

Despite these corrupt initiatives and their origins, major polling averages regularly used by mainstream media have included the results of these partisan pollsters in the averages they publish daily. It is intellectually and methodologically dishonest and deeply misleading. Those who have sold the averages as gospel, or even as credible, are committing the worst kind of journalistic misconduct.

Of course, the recent surge in this activity has not been enough to counteract the fact that momentum is coming from the Harris campaign. Independent polls (like the Iowa Selzer poll) show this. This is also reflected in the turnout of groups that are seen as tending to be pro-Harris – especially women. Women currently represent eight percent more voters than men, with over 75 million votes cast.

This is one of the solid data reasons why Republicans are already moving to Plan B. Trump has prefaced every election campaign with the face-saving argument that the polls were manipulated 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 winning voter support the old-fashioned way win .

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