Surprised by Trump’s win? Media bias hid what Americans really think

It was a long night for all of us ink-stained wretches. I myself had a beautifully crafted piece prepared to run in the morning about how defeated conservatives could learn from Antonio Gramsci — who was clapped in a fascist prison 90 years ago today, only to spend his time behind bars crafting the left’s “long march through the institutions.” 

{mosads}But no one’s night was longer than the public opinion pollsters who had reassured our nation’s elites right up through yesterday morning that Donald Trump was an ugly, retrograde aberration of a dying socio-ethnic group, who’d be crushed in a 40-state blowout. The party he left behind would be a shamed and battered husk, dominated by those few Republicans who had taken a “principled” stand and refused to back their party’s nominee. The party would duly adopt respectable opinions on social issues and immigration, and an era of national healing could begin. 

I wouldn’t want to be in those pollsters’ loafers right now.

Unlike the rest of the opinion industry, pollsters are meant not to shape or manufacture a political consensus. They are simply asked to measure it. And as we have seen, most failed completely. Here’s a round-up of the last set of major polls published before the election, courtesy of Bing:

[[{“fid”:”120980″,”view_mode”:”original_image”,”fields”:{“format”:”original_image”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:”Poll aggregate “,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Poll aggregate “,”field_url[und][0][value]”:”Bing”,”field_folder[und]”:”1″,”field_free_html[und][0][value]”:”

Poll aggregate 

“,”field_free_html[und][0][format]”:”full_html”,”style”:””},”type”:”media”,”attributes”:{}}]]

As a former reporter for Investor’s Business Daily, I’m a little bit proud that they came out the closest. The real vote totals, of course, yielded these results, according to Associated Press: 

The gap was wide enough to make a skeptical reader remember how Clinton campaign chair John Podesta corresponded with a pollster about oversampling to gain a desired result.

But I don’t wish to suggest that most pollsters were engaged in conscious subterfuge. These organizations have a solid professional interest in being proved right, year after year. Or at least in coming close. 

While some pollsters with a strong partisan agenda might be willing to take a risk to tip what they thought was a very close race, I doubt there are many such people. And anyway, few seemed to think that this race would even be so close. Like Pauline Kael in 1972, no one they knew was backing Trump. As it turned out, few of the Trump supporters they interviewed were willing to say so either. 

Now why would that be? The obvious parallels between this vote and the Brexit referendum are worth pointing out and unfolding. If multiple media that dominate the public face of debate, the experts on television, key leaders in both political parties, professors, bishops, and even (in Trump’s case) the pope make it overwhelmingly clear that there is only one respectable choice in an election, two things can happen:

1) People can be cowed into changing their minds, out of fear of being tainted by association with a cause that is widely detested by people of obvious power. 

2) People can get resentful at the heavy-handedness of their “betters,” and decide to give the “condemned” cause a second look. And maybe a third. As a Catholic, I think that Pope Francis’ ham-handed comments about Donald Trump’s Christian credentials helped him clinch the nomination.

If people with no access to elite institutions feel that those who are running things are deluded, corrupt, or doing a rotten job, then the pressure campaign can backfire. 

Instead of a white flag, those who feel deeply dissatisfied might fly the Jolly Roger. Remember how all those Jeb Bush ads became almost a punch line — leading some to actually calculate how much he spent per primary vote compared to skinflints like Cruz and Trump? Something similar happened in Britain, as witty Leave advocates like Daniel Hannan began to collect the most outrageously apocalyptic predictions made by the “best and brightest” of the consequences of Brexit.

A really obvious media bias that’s apparently unfair can make the “approved” cause (Clinton, in this case) seem desperate or shady. At which point something like the squalor revealed by Wikileaks can take on a viral quality — and gain even greater credibility from the fact that major media are ignoring it, while blatantly keeping alive every negative story about the “condemned” cause, Trump.

Some media analyst somewhere should compare the net hours of coverage devoted to Donald Trump’s crass sexual remarks of a decade ago to the time spent reporting on the Clinton Foundation’s close ties with ISIS sponsor Qatar. 

Once stories like the latter emerge on social media, and get passed from friend to friend, the mainstream media’s credibility gap begins to widen — and the evident double standard helps firm up support for insurgent candidates and causes. 

It might be time for news organizations that want polls with accurate results to try to fix the partisan tilt of their news coverage and commentary. Shaming people in advance about their strongly held beliefs is hardly the best way to encourage candor. 

Zmirak is Senior Editor of The Stream, and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.