Pollster Larry Sabato’s “shattered” Crystal Ball has been superglued back together after his laughably off-base projections of a Hillary Clinton landslide in the 2016 election. And guess what? He’s seeing blue again.
The man who calculated an Electoral College romp for Hillary now says a Democratic wave is coming in the midterm elections. Unsurprisingly, the complicit media has been right there to parrot his Magic 8-ball as political “science” once more.
Professional Partisan
“GOP Struggling in States Pres. Trump Won in 2016,” the banner type reads as MSNBC ’s Meet the Press Daily show trots Sabato out for his expert forecasting. “Even if the Republicans hold the Senate, given the very pro-Republican math that exists, President Trump is in trouble in some of these states,” the pollster proclaims with all the authority he can muster. “He’s fallen considerably in approval and the Midwest as a whole seems to be flipping in the midterm year,” Sabato sweepingly declares. My, that is a very strong statement.
MTP Daily host Chuck Todd, echoing the establishment line to a T, then throws out the thoroughly partisan talking point that tariffs are hurting Trump with Midwestern voters. This is a key monolithic Big Media framing issue, despite the lack of any reason whatsoever to believe these same overheated polls and news outlets that were so spectacularly wrong in 2016. It’s not difficult to find other polls and reportage that show Americans who are fully supportive of Trump using the power of the tariff to protect U.S. workers and bring manufacturing jobs back to this country.
“After all, those tariffs seem to be hurting people in the Midwest more than other regions,” Sabato announces before wandering off into a vague discussion of how Midwesterners are “nice” people and therefore don’t like Trump’s combative personality. Todd and Sabato then both break into a mutually affirming exchange where they declare 2016 was, in fact, a rejection of Hillary Clinton and not an embrace of Donald Trump.
So here we have another distorted globalist media attack at work. And Sabato just so happens to be on call to “confirm” the fantasy that Todd and his ilk are so desperately trying to convince you is fact.
Dress to Suppress
It’s important to note that this whole contrived dialogue is aimed at the very people who propelled Trump into office in 2016. There’s a reason for this: It’s called voter suppression. They’re trying to tell Trump supporters that 2018 is a lost cause. They did this in 2016. It didn’t work then. There is no reason to believe it will work this year either.
It’s amazing that Sabato would go back to the same well that served him so poorly and claim that rural and blue-collar workers are tilting blue in 2018 after he was so epically wrong about these very same voters in 2016.
Sabato is based at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. In an interview posted on the school’s website immediately following the 2016 election, he struggled to come to terms with how off all the major polling was. In doing so, he made a telling point: “I talked to one pollster this morning who told me that at least in their case, and he thought in others, their model had not weighted the rural white vote to the extent they should have because it’s through the roof…”
In an appearance on “Fox & Friends” the day after the election, he echoed those sentiments. “You know what really got me. After hundreds of surveys – we plugged hundreds of surveys into our system and over 90 percent were wrong. And they managed to miss almost entirely this tremendous turnout in rural America.”
And in a mea culpa online post, Sabato and his Crystal Ball team admitted they completely blew it with Midwestern voters:
“We thought the signs pointed to Hillary Clinton winning the White House. We thought that even if she lost Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio, her Midwestern ‘firewall’ of states that not only had voted for Barack Obama twice, but hadn’t voted for a Republican since the 1980s, would hold for her.”
Same Tired Tune
To anybody who knew what the 2016 election was really about – and Sabato and his fellow professional pollsters clearly did not have the first clue – what happened in the Rust Belt wasn’t surprising at all. The establishment-tied pollsters were still playing the Uniparty Elephant vs. Donkey game that dominated the Bush-Clinton-Obama era. Those who realized the 2016 election was really about nationalism vs. globalism fully expected Trump to do well in these states.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]It’s called voter suppression.[/perfectpullquote]
Protest candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) won Michigan over globalist Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. There was no reason in the world to have Michigan leaning blue in the general election against another protest candidate who was also appealing to the working class. Yet Sabato did just that and had Hillary winning most of the Rust Belt to boot. An unbiased professional simply would not have made that projection. A partisan, however, would.
“I’m with you if you’re saying that a red wave ain’t going to happen,” Sabato told his fellow performer Todd. “It’s just a question about how big the blue wave is. It could be a tsunami. It could be a middle-sized wave. It could be a small wave. But there’s going to be a blue wave.”
It’s a crystal ball he’s got there. What could possibly go wrong?
