Originally published at: Arizona election deniers starting to protest mid-term results | Boing Boing
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The day has just begun and its race for “least surprising news” already has a winner (ironically, an event involving a pair of losers).
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But ya lost Blanche, ya lost.
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It’s especially dark and twisted that they will use polls as their “evidence”. As we’ve discussed in other threads here on the BBS, the GOP has been flooding the market with biased polls for various ends. Now those bad polls will be used to claim fraud. 
As if polls are ever even right, never mind evidence of anything.
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This election seems to have punctured the core fabrication that trump and the GQP engineered after 2020. The fact is that when you’re dealing with such massive numbers with zero evidence of corruption, eventually anyone who is just dabbling peels away. It’s the same with vaccine lies; when 79% of the population, including children, have gotten as many as four injections, the numbers become so unassailable that even anecdotal BS becomes drowned out by the lived reality of “my arm was sore for a couple of days”.
But by all means, if you want to waste millions of your chump supporters’ money chasing squirrels, go right ahead. You’ve lost all of the governorships and AG races that would have let you put that to any use.
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And the thing is, despite the “red wave” narrative, most of those polls never showed a decisive GQP dominance, but mostly narrow leads within the margin of error. The ones that did were from Trafalgar and other openly-biased shills (which did tip the aggregate +R, but that’s 538 et al’s fault for being suckers). I’m happily surprised by the outcome being so decisively progressive, but there was never any evidence, even in the anachronistic polling methodology, that this would be an easy path for the GQP.
Edited for typo and clarity.
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Polls had the Trumpster losing his first presidency run too there, bud.
Wanna contest that one?
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“Polls had me winning Maricopa. No way we lost Maricopa”
There is a reason we actually vote and count the votes as opposed to just letting the pollsters decide.
Which I know is me arguing the logic while they are arguing disingenuously, after all in 2018 none of the election deniers of the last two years stood up and said "No way Trump won, the polls all had Hillery way ahead. Even Nate only gave our guy like a 17% chance. No way, just count 'em again until you get it right!
Polls are guesses, when the actual voters disagree the polls were wrong.
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Every in-depth interview with legitimate pollsters I’ve ever read ultimately saw them faced with the question “What about all the people who won’t talk to you?” They ultimately answer “We adjust our findings to accommodate for that.” which literally means “We guess.”
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It’s just so disappointing that they always argue in bad faith. You never once hear one of these people demanding a recount when they benefit. Why no recount in North Dakota?
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For a group that wants to do away with mail-in and early voting, the MAGA folks sure do want to elevate polls to the position of some kind of binding early vote.
Since they’re not well-understood and can conceivably affect voter behaviour, maybe publishing poll results should be the thing that is suppressed or outlawed, rather than voting rights and measures to make voting easier?
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Hear hear! And just to add one more evil effect of how bad polling is confused with reality: political parties are known/admit to provide funding for candidates on the basis of such polls. So, as an example, the Washington state Democrat Marie Pérez (who thank-the-cosmos won against a total Nazi) was granted very little funding by the DNC because 538 gave her only a 2% chance of winning. As this is often the case (“We have to put our limited funds where there is some hope”), one can see how this makes polling more predictive than it should be - erroneous polling → poor funding for candidate → results are self-fulfilling
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This is how it goes.
First vote is counted: D
“that is bullshit, this is the corruption I’ve been telling everybody about”
Second vote is counted: R
“as expected, these gains show solid support”
Third vote is counted: R
"Stop the counting, we just won… no more… put those mail-ins down… it’s OVER… if you keep counting I’m taking this all to a court of law… then you’ll be sorry. "
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In the same way that we have to explain, “the stock market is not the economy”, here we have to wake people up to see that the vote is the only vote and polls are being increasingly manipulated.
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Polls are in some sense a model of how the vote will go. And when your model disagrees with reality, which is wrong? That’s right, it’s reality that is mistaken – the right-wing determined that at least as far back as Reagan.
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As predicted, “the polls” can’t be trusted, unless they’re in your favor, then they’re 100% correct.
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I was hoping to evoke that in particular, glad it worked. 
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This has been the throughline of neoliberalism, which has now bled its way past economics into American foreign policy (see the neoCon PNAC fantasy), “reality” television (where von Clownstick was portrayed as a competent tycoon), and of course social media (where billions of dollars are thrown at building a reality-free “Metaverse” in which we’re expected to spend most of our time).
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These fuckers need to be prosecuted for undermining the electoral process.
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