The Trump vs. DeSantis Polls Are Pure Junk - STOP looking at them!

There are four main things that make American politics interesting and newsworthy: Election campaigns, Congress doing the work of legislating, a scandal, or a war. Without any of these four things, the political news cycle begins to starve. For this reason, the first half of the third year of a President's term is sort of a political Purgatory. The third year of a President's term comes off the heels of the midterm election, so there is no active campaigns occurring. In the midterm election, the party out of power has usually made gains in Congress, often flipping a chamber or two, making Congress deadlocked, and not passing any significant legislation other than continuing resolutions and the occasional budget compromise. And unless the President is in really big trouble from a scandal, or we're actively bombing brown people on live TV (see 1991), there's no real news.

That is exactly the position where we find ourselves today, but that doesn't mean the media will not try to create news to catch your attention. Last I checked, the news media is still the same corporate enterprise it was last year, which means they need you to turn on the TV and watch their ads. Why do you think CNN has been providing wall-to-wall coverage of Joe Biden's classified documents fiasco? It's not because it actually matters; no reasonable person could believe that democrats would actually convict Joe Biden of an impeachment relating to it, and no American voter is going to give a shit about it when they vote for President two years from now. But, it's one of the four pillars of exciting political news. A scandal! So they must make a fuss about it!

The news media is doing the same thing in regard to the 2024 election. Donald Trump, the MAGA King, is the only legally declared candidate for President, and he isn't even holding rallies. This summer will be much more newsworthy for the campaign, as we get to watch the absolute dumpster fire that will be the first debates. My own personal opinion on the state of the 2024 GOP primary race has been simple, and unchanging. We must assume that Donald Trump will be the nominee until Ron DeSantis can prove that he has a chance at winning. And that can really only materialize if he wins a state Donald Trump won in the 2016 primary. But the media doesn't want to wait for that long, so they introduce...2024 polls! 

Since the conclusion of the midterm elections, polling agencies have been running a slew of polls for the 2024 election. You can look at the full collection of polls by going to https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/. But one quick look at these polls shows an abundance of discrepancies that should disqualify them from being valid at all. Some of these polls show Ron DeSantis leading Donald Trump, and others show Donald Trump winning in a landslide. And every time one of these polls comes out, it provides news sites like The Hill and Politico the opporitunity to publish a clickbait article saying "Is Trump finished? New poll comes out showing him losing to DeSantis." Or if a poll comes out the other direction, "DeSantis STILL LOSING to Trump. MAGA King still reigns???" 

Here's some examples of how wildly different these polls are from each other:

Emerson Poll:

• Trump - 55%, DeSantis - 29%. 
• Trump - 44%, Biden - 41%
• Biden - 41%, DeSantis - 40%
• Generic Congressional Ballot: Democrats - 45%, Republicans - 42%

Morning Consult:

• Trump - 49%, DeSantis - 30%
• Biden - 44%, Trump - 41%
• DeSantis - 43%, Biden - 41%

Harris Poll:

• Trump - 55%, DeSantis - 45%
• DeSantis - 42%, Biden - 39%
• Trump - 46%, Biden 41%
• Biden Approval Rating: 45% Approve, 48% Disapprove

YouGov:

• DeSantis - 45%, Trump 42%

All of these polls were taken within two weeks of each other, which means that there was no huge real-life shift in the political atmosphere between each of these polls. But to have polls ranging from a Donald Trump lead of over 20 points to DeSantis actually overtaking the MAGA King by 3 points is not simply reasonable differences in statistics. It means that these polls are pure junk, and you need to stop looking at them!

My other big complaint about these polls? Their general election polls make no sense at all! Some of them show Biden doing better against DeSantis than he performs against Trump, while some show Biden doing better against Trump. One of the polls shows 45% of Americans approving of Joe Biden's performance as President, and yet he only gets 41% or 39% of the vote in the poll, losing to both Trump and DeSantis. That kind of poll is so bad, it's like somebody took 8 ounces of horse manure, seasoned it with cat litter and nail clippings, deep-fried it in trans fat, poured ghost pepper sauce on it, and called it a Filet Mignon. While polls should be expected to differ, they should usually follow a clear pattern - and these polls are simply flying sideways off the map. It makes zero sense for Trump to be leading Biden by 3 percent when he's never won the popular vote, and the same poll shows Democrats leading Republicans in the generic ballot by 3 percent. 

The biggest problem for these pollsters is that most Americans, like the people in the suburbs of Detriot who take their kid to school every day and then go work at the car plant, or the soccer moms in northern Philly, are not actively following this stuff. As a result, they are not going to answer the phone for a political pollster in a year without an election because they have better things to do. "Call me back when there's an actual election happening," they would say. So the people who answer these polls are going to be the most engaged and most politically active Americans. Whatever result comes from them cannot be viewed as reliable. I'm not saying we should ditch pollsters forever, but please ditch them when the people answering them are not representative of the whole public.

So for now, don't pay attention to the polls of the 2024 republican primary. They mean absolutely nothing until this summer's primary debates put politics back in the forefront of Americans' minds. What we should be paying more attention to are Ron DeSantis' next moves as he gears up to challenge Trump - and we should be looking towards the GOP-controlled House of Representatives as they threaten economic arson to achieve their demented policy ideas. The pollsters can wait.