We Were Polling Along…

By Charlie Johnston

When I was running a group of Chicago-area weekly newspapers, I occasionally brought volunteers in to run polls on heated local races, under my supervision. It worked out well. The furthest we were ever off from the final result was less than 3 points.

There is a bona fide science to classic polling. But to get it right you need three things:

1. A genuinely random sample.
2. A genuinely representative sample.
3. A sufficiently large sample to minimize the margin of error.

If any of these three things is missing you are not engaging in polling: you are engaging in guesswork which you cover with a cloud of data. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is that you are pushing a false narrative and trying to obscure your venality behind a cloud of data.

In defense of pollsters, certain improvements in technology have made it practically impossible to get a truly random sample. Before the rise of caller ID and cell phones, people who picked up were truly random. Now, many do not respond to pollsters (or anyone they don’t know). Further, with the violent tactics that the Democrats have embraced, many people seeing a pollster suspect it is a phony name for their local Antifa chapter looking for whose homes to vandalize. Now, the people who answer are a self-selected group rather than a random group. The first major predicate is now nigh impossible to get.

Getting a genuinely representative sample is where pollsters have dummied up poll results from the beginning. To do it properly, you need to choose precincts in a pattern that matches up well with historical results. Thus, if a district is 55% Democrat, you would choose something like five Dem precincts, 3 GOP precincts, and five bellweather precincts for the highest degree of accuracy (that sample is not exactly what you would do, but close enough that you should understand the principle involved.) The pool of voters you are going to sample is usually called the “universe” you will use. If the sample is not representative of previous results in that district, you are not polling; you are creating a narrative.

Manipulating the “universe” is the most common way to skew polls. Several years back, I watched the media highlight a race where many felt a GOP upset was brewing. The media’s selected polls showed it rock steady for the Democrat. But a full poll report shows what are called “crosstabs.” These give extensive demographic information, including political affiliation, of those polled and how they answered on the overall universe used. Most laymen know nothing about crosstabs, but just pay attention to the “horserace” question. Everybody deeply in the business always watches the crosstabs – because that is where the sausage is made.

In this race, while the horserace question the media reported was stable, if you watched the crosstabs, the pollster was having to use an increasingly Dem-tilted universe to get it, until the final universe polled was almost 80% Dem aligned. Obviously, if your sample is not representative, you can almost dictate what results you get.

To try to correct this, pollsters almost always now weight certain data, correct it, and build their universe on what they think the turnout mix will be. That is with an honest pollster who tries to get it right. With partisans trying to create a narrative, they can make it say almost anything they want it to.

Several decades ago, I commissioned a “brushfire” poll in a Congressional Race I was running where I smelled an upset coming in our favor. (A brushfire poll is a relatively small sample over a short period that is heavily weighted to the horserace question). I contacted a mid-level pollster. We had worked together on a few things before and he did pretty good work. After covering all the things needed and wording the questions, he asked me, “So, what do you want the results to show, Charlie?” I drily told him I wanted a straight poll for internal use – not pumped up press release clickbait.

Even in the best of circumstances, modern polling is not the scientifically grounded process it was from the 1940’s into the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. There are things you can do to improve the accuracy of results – but in the end, it is just educated guesswork now. It is brutally hard to get a truly random, honest process now. To their credit, some pollsters do make a heroic effort to do so. But they, too, know that it is primarily the quality of their assumptions in building the universe that make it so.

On the other hand, it is pathetically easy to make a poll return the results you want it to – and requires a small fraction of the work it takes to get it right. Many, maybe even most, polling companies today, are in the business of telling their clients what they want to hear and making it look sciency. This is why, at the beginning of May, Politico, Axios, and most of the establishment and left-leaning media were talking about the coming failure of Trump endorsements to make the electorate more conservative. Hey, the polls proved it! It’s science! Except as results came in over the course of the month, Trump helped voters oust tons of RINOs in primaries, often tossing incumbents out by huge margins. The media companies weren’t getting actual polling; they were getting sciency looking reams of data that told them what they had paid the pollsters to tell them.

That is the fatal flaw in using data collection to set a narrative rather than to find where you actually stand. Reality always eventually asserts itself – and begins eroding your credibility in the process. Sadly, the extensive use of manipulated data also undermines confidence in actually sound principles, as well.

Do not be surprised that now, through election day, the polls are going to show Donald Trump and conservative Republicans with double-plus-ungood approval ratings. That is what the media pays their pollsters to do. Don’t be surprised when rational genuine conservatives keep winning by growing margins despite this. The bad news for the media and the looney left is that the folksies have gotten wise to them. Instead of jumping on to the bandwagon effect the media is trying to create, people are getting increasingly infuriated by the condescension and manipulation – and are punishing the manipulators. Certainly, that was the story in the month of May. I expect it will continue to grow and gain force.

Obviously, the actual science of polling is extensive and a bit complicated. I could write a small tome on it. So don’t think this even begins to cover the ground there is to be covered. But it does cover the fundamental operating principles – and tells you why so many polls are so wildly divergent from actual results these days.

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 Thirteen years ago I revealed that I believe I have been getting heavenly visitations all my life and that, despite the seeming tranquility, we were headed for a great storm, a pitched battle, a global civil war fought on cultural lines. It caught on quickly…I guess went viral, globally. I was the flavor of the month for a while. Many conventional thinkers inside the Church and out went nuts for a time, demanding that I be condemned unless I quit spreading such alarmist nonsense.

Thank God my Archbishop at the time, Samuel Aquila, appointed a commission to investigate me. Thank God because they read everything I had publicly written, watched all the videos I appeared in, and were even given access to the private writings I had given my Priest directors since 1995 – almost 20 years before I said anything publicly. And they really studied them. Abp. Aquila decided I could continue, with the restriction that I could not give a formal presentation on Catholic property in Denver. That was amazing. Abp. Aquila knew that I would obey his legitimate authority on the matter, so the easiest thing in the world would have been to shut me down. But he took his vocation seriously – and worked to be just to me while protecting the flock he headed from any abuses.

Oddly, as we actually went into the storm I had so accurately described the hubbub died down. I certainly continued to analyze geopolitics, culture, and society – and would occasionally reference my visitations. But I never treated it as a long-form TV series where I had to come up with something new and exciting every week.

Now, in the middle of the continuing strife of that storm, I say that the ground is being visibly cleared for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart and the opening of great era of peace – and much of the ‘signs and wonders’ crowd has become very upset at me. It is for refusing to say that we are doomed and headed for mass destruction.

I am actually not saying much of anything new beyond what I said from the start. I ALWAYS emphasized that, though this storm would at times feel like the end, it is NOT the end. Rather, it is, indeed, like birthing pains of the renewal of the faith and face of the earth. As it said in the old Simon and Garfunkel song, The Boxer, most men hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. The conventionalists disregarded my insistence that the storm was not for destruction, but renewal. The blackpilled in the mystical cohort disregarded the same, oddly. But the latter were happy about it while the former were unhappy. It suggests that, for many people, analysis and, even, prophecy, is not a matter of reason or insight, but a matter of temperament – and they get vested in what they want to hear and believe.

I can understand people being vested in wanting to believe that tranquility is permanent and nothing will change for the worse. I have a more difficult time understanding why some people would get vested in the idea that mass destruction is ahead and unavoidable. But either way, it is not a product of insight, but of vanity. We need to see – and interpret – things as they are, not as we want them to be to show our superior wisdom or morality.

I once wryly complained to my angel that most people who say they hear directly from God only ever get confirmation of what they already believe. Yet heavenly beings so frequently contradicted me and sent me back to the drawing board…what was up with that? I expected him to join in a little light banter with me about it. Instead, he solemnly (if not unkindly) replied, “We really are talking to you, though, and you will be held to account (to use it for God’s will, not yours.)” Those who pretend that their own inner voice is God in order to give their opinions greater authority are silly. They will be disciplined and corrected in God’s good time. But woe to those who do hear from Him and eventually twist and pervert what He says for their own ends. Unless they repent, it would have been better for them to have never heard true at all.

God is very forgiving of honest error. When He says “ducts” our comparatively childish minds usually hear “ducks.” He knows that the best of us are feeble, easily distracted creatures in this world. Often our honest errors are teachable moments for us – by Him. To intentionally twist the words of God to your own ends, though, is a horrific – if subtle – form of blasphemy.

Of course, many people honestly believe we are headed for destruction. As I said, God is very forgiving of honest error.

Lest you think that all will be sweetness and light from here based on what I say, though, I remind you of how adventure and thriller novels go: 80% of the perilous action falls in the last 20% of the narrative. We are in the last 20% of the storm.

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered an intriguing take on why Pres. Trump is so uncharacteristically indecisive on whether to negotiate with Iran’s Islamic Republic leaders or just finish them. Gingrich says that Trump is focused on building and cementing a coalition of Israel and Arab States to form a de facto collective security agreement in the Middle East – and so is going the extra mile to make sure to take into account various coalition partners’ particular sensitivities as we wind this all down.

If so (and I think it very likely) it is brilliant – and well worth the discomfort of ending this war a bit clumsily. It is an effort not just to solve this problem, but to put together a permanent approach to Middle Eastern security problems. If successful, it would not just solve military and peace issues, but would provide means for dramatic economic and fraternal benefits stretching out into the far future. It would be laying a profound piece of the foundation for the Triumph. The mind boggles at the audacity of this plan, if that is what it really is.

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Last Friday, May 29, was the Feast Day of Pope St. Paul VI, the most underrated Pope of my lifetime. His Humanae Vitae, which forbade artificial birth control, was the single most prophetic document of my lifetime. It accurately predicted almost all of the social and cultural ills that would flow from reducing sexual union to mere recreational status. He was pilloried by dissident Catholics (including MANY clerics) for it. But he was right. He told us true. It was the first major counter-attack against the modern assault on the family that was foretold by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. It is short and to the point. I hope you will read it in the link I provided. The first time I read it after my entry into the Church I was astonished. It was a dire warning of what we would become if it became common. And so we have become that people.

St. Paul VI, pray for us!

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

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