The polls are wrong. They really are. They have to be. They don’t say what I want them to say so they clearly are wrong. After all, I’ve talked to people, and my anecdotes are clearly proof of greater reality rather than a snapshot of my personal experience. The world is solely what happens immediately around me. Right? Yeah. Yeah, I’m right.
That’s what Trump supporters are thinking. Polls be damned. They learned nothing from denying the results of polling in ‘12. They’re ready and willing to do it again. They are eager to ignore reality.
Buzzfeed spoke to Trump supporters at a rally in North Carolina last night.
A flurry of recent presidential election polls showing Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump in the race for the White House are “fake.” They’re “skewed.” They’re “manipulated.” Trump is going to ”win in a landslide.”
If all the polling says something, but it contradicts what I want it to be, then the polls must be wrong.
“I don’t believe in the polls,” said Phillip Morgon, who attended the rally with two friends from Concord, North Carolina. “They ain’t called us.”
This was a common statement. The polling must be wrong because no pollster specifically called the person being quoted (there are several others quoted saying the same kind of they-didn’t-call-me type of comment). An inability to recognize a greater reality outside of one’s own personal experience must be a fundamental quality of conservatives (no wonder we can’t get them to accept the reality of things like climate change).
“Nobody has asked me,” said Breeding. “I don’t see people on social media saying that they support Hillary Clinton. I think mainstream media manipulates polls to benefit her so that people think there is no reason to vote. I believe Trump is up, and he will win in November by a big margin.”
You keep right on believing that. They’ll be just as baffled this time as they were with Romney. They’ll invent every reason that they lost other than the fact that they legitimately lost. But don’t worry, Trump won’t actually lose; Jesus will insure it.
He believes many people will back Trump by Election Day even if they currently don’t plan to. “I do believe he will win,” he said. “Some may walk into the voting booth intent on voting for Hillary, but they will hear from Jesus that a man should be our leader.”
(Yeah, that’s not sexist and misogynistic at all.)