November 7, 2023: I have not republished an article previously posted here, but this is a good time to start. This article was originally published on November 12, 2022. Many people seem to be in a tizzy about a poll published at this time, in November 2023, about the 2024 elections a year from now. The polls were conducted by Siena College, I believe, and published by The New York Times. Ridiculous. Read on. This has happened before, in fact, it happened before the last election as well. Guess what? People of good will won that election too. So, as I have already said, read on. Thank you.
Editing (Image by LexisNexis)
A "tell" in poker is information that a player at the table gives away about the hand they hold. A tell can be a twitch of the eye, a tug on the ear, or anything else that the poker player does not realize they are doing when they telegraph what kind of hand they have.
Up until a few months ago, the story repeated in the media was that the Midterm Elections of 2022 would bring a "Blue Wave." Then the stories changed, and they became stories that a "Red Wave" was coming instead. These stories stayed up in the media until the Election, when of course there was no red wave after all.
Earlier this week, a few days after the Election, a journalist revealed on a podcast that the story changed because Republican mega-donors commissioned new polls that would say that a red wave was on the way. Whether or not journalists knew that at the time, they printed the multi-millionaires' poll results. That says a lot about 21st Century Journalism right there: Journalists did not fully investigate before they published.
Even if some journalists did not know the story behind the oligarchs' polls, all journalists knew that the Republicans did not reveal (even anonymously) their private polling data. Parenthetically, Republicans have apparently shown journalists their private polling date in many past elections, at least when the data was favorable to Republicans. Journalists knew that months ago.
Months ago, Republicans knew pretty much that they would not do well in the Midterms this year. Otherwise they would have shared their private polling data. You can bet that if the data was good for them, they would have published it early and often.
Not sharing private poll results is a tell.
Journalists did not tell us that the Republicans this year did not share their private polling data. Journalists just printed stories based on the polls commissioned to predict a "Red Wave." They wrote, in essence, "Be afraid, be very afraid," right up until Election Day earlier this week. Now they are writing a different story, that there certainly is not a red wave.
The secretly held private polling results was a major big tell. The journalists knew. And they did not tell us.
Other than they, the journalists, who said it is a good idea to pay attention to them?
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