Trump Isn’t
Playing to Win the Election, He’s Plotting to Steal It – David Rothkopf
Team Trump know they have lost. They have known
for a while. They are not playing to win. They’re playing to steal the
election.
During the past week
alone, they have released as many fake polls—75 in total, created not to
reflect public opinion but to serve a political purpose—as they have during the
entire period since Kamala Harris officially became the
Democratic candidate..ORE
These polls are not
intended to have an effect on the outcome of the election. Rather, their
purpose is to tee up Big Lie 2.0, Trump’s argument that he was ahead, the polls
showed it and that any Harris victory has to be the result of cheating.
While such polls are
costly, estimates suggest that tens of millions have been spent on
politically-biased purpose polls during the course of this campaign, and
require an enormous amount of coordination, they are by no means the only part
of the extensive effort by Trump, his campaign, the MAGA GOP and the enemy
governments who are supporting their efforts to lay the groundwork for a
massive series of challenges to the 2024 election results.
These challenges
have included everything from Trump social media posts this past week
suggesting that Pennsylvania election officials are rigging the election
against him, to scores of lawsuits across the country seeking to get voters
stripped from voting rolls (which will provide important fodder for future
claims to delay certification)—or, as in the case of Georgia, to stop the state
from processing ballots from drop boxes to the spread of disinformation about
the elections (including fictitious stories created, peddled and promoted by
Russian intelligence).
Democratic
strategist Simon Rosenberg has designated the people
behind the purpose polls as “red wave” pollsters because some of them were
behind the misperception that Republicans would do far better than they did in
the 2022 election. He asserts that such pollsters dropped 17 polls on Sunday
alone and at least 75 during the past week. His estimate it is that something
like 125 such polls have been circulated since August.
He also counts
“prediction markets” like Polymarket, funded by Trump supporters like Peter
Thiel, as part of this overall effort to create a misperception about the state
of the campaign and to “shape the election narrative for Trump.”
Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer tweeted
on this phenomenon, “When Republicans lose on Tuesday they‘ll be shocked bc all
the polls they paid for promised them they’d win. That‘s a feature, not a bug,
you the ’flood the zone’ strategy Rs are using. They need people expect to win
to get them to commit felonies 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
intent of the GOP initiative has gotten neither the attention nor traction they
warrant.
Rosenberg gets
specific when he makes the case about these pollsters and the overall effort to
pollute and distort the public’s perception of what is happening.
For example, he
observes, “TIPP, the pollster who has been doing a daily tracking poll and
played a major role in tipping all
the averages and forecasters to Trump has as its corporate slogan, “talent on
loan from God”—Rush Limbaugh’s tag line.“ He also urges voters to “just look at
their website—it is far right fever dream stuff.”
As for the emergence
of Polymarket, he says, “This is a very serious issue. It is an off-shore
crypto company funded by Thiel and has spent enormous sums of money spreading
their pro-Trump betting market as a legit window into the election. They are a
very bad new actor 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 trade the presidential stuff on their platform
legally.”
The authorities
should be aware of such foreign actors, and the ties some of them—like Elon
Musk—have to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. There should be a
similar awareness of the activity of Russian intelligence in the marketplace,
and the fact that some of the work done for Trump by entities like Polymarket
(or Twitter) may constitute illegally in-kind or foreign campaign
contributions. When this election is over, if Trump’s efforts are rebuffed,
major investigations by both the intelligence community and the Department of
Justice are clearly called for.
Despite such corrupt
initiatives and their origins, major polling averages that are used by
mainstream media regularly, have incorporated the results from this partisan
pollsters into the averages they tout daily. It is intellectually and
methodologically dishonest and it is deeply misleading. Those who’ve sold the
averages as gospel or even credible are guilty of the worst sort of
journalistic malpractice.
“They are desperate. They will do
anything to win.”
— David Rothkopf
The recent surge in
this activity, of course, has not been enough to counter the reality that the
momentum is with the Harris campaign. Independent polls (like the Iowa Selzer
poll) are showing this. Turnout among groups that are seen to be trending pro-Harris—notably
women—is also showing this. Currently, with over 75 million votes already cast,
women represent eight percent more of the electorate than do men.
That is among the
hard data reasons that Republicans are already moving on to Plan B. Trump has
prefaced every election effort with a face-saving argument that the polls are
rigged against him. But as we saw since the election in 2020, Trump and his
team have made their post-campaign strategies even more central to their efforts than has been the
traditional business of running for president and seeking to win the support of
voters the old-fashioned way.
In fact, the GOP
plan, like Trump in 2021, views the will of the people as a distraction to be
overcome. Knowing they can’t win on Election Day, they are seeking to win in
the courts, with the aid of political leaders including those in the Congress,
and, if necessary, as on Jan. 6, through acts of violence. They are desperate.
They will do anything to win. And if that undoes democracy in America, that’s
just fine as that has been their overall goal from the beginning.
