Election Deniers: Some Democrats Believe the Polls are All Lies and Part of a Conspiracy Theory to Make Abortion Appear Less Popular Than It Is

Optimistic Democrats insist the polls are wrong, says The Hill.

Remember when conservatives were called crazed conspiracy theorists for stating, correctly, that leftwing media polls routinely understate the conservative vote by 4-5 points?

But now Democrats say the polls are all lying so it's cool.

Every election has its holdouts who predict polling and conventional wisdom leading up to the big vote is way off. This year, the optimism caucus has to work overtime for Democrats.

With less than a week to go until Election Day, most Democrats are bracing for potentially huge defeats -- including losing one or both chambers of Congress -- but some in the party aren't willing to concede anything just yet.

"I don't believe the GOP is headed for any kind of a wave," said Angelo Cocchiaro, a Democratic Party activist based in Virginia. "The polls show tight races nationwide. I'm expecting Dems [to] pick up a few seats in the Senate, and in the House," he added. "A historically close result."

What if, some Democrats are whispering, liberals are right about abortion rights being vastly underrepresented as a motivating factor for voters? What if the drop in gas prices goes a long way in swing states? What if there's record-setting turnout? What if Democrats' warnings about the fragility of democracy work in their favor?

And what if, as President Biden preached from the Democratic National Committee last week, the polls he described as "all over the place" offer a surprise ending: "one more shift: Democrats ahead."

These are the variables that keep some liberals hopeful with days to go.

Early voting is one of Democrats' strongest indications that things could go their way in some places. The party's turnout model was based for years, including in 2018, on convincing voters to show up on Tuesday each cycle. But that's notably changed.

This year, campaigns and party operatives have invested heavily into persuading people to vote before Nov. 8 -- a tactical shift that some Democratic strategists say has already worked in their favor.

...

The shift in approach has prompted some Democrats and election forecasters to caution against the so-called "red wave" narrative that has caught on in the last stretch of the midterms.

"When you get a big early vote, you get more turnout for your voters," Rosenberg said. "The Republicans' decision to not promote early vote was a mistake. Our embrace of the early vote gives us an advantage."

A voting tracker on Thursday said that more than 32 million ballots have already been cast across the country.

Some also point to Democrats' fundraising advantages in certain races. In New Hampshire, for example, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) has massively outraised her GOP rival, retired Gen. Don Bolduc, according to the latest filings with the Federal Election Commission, allowing her to keep flooding the airwaves in the small but consequential state. Bolduc, meanwhile, has received renewed financial support from aligned Republican groups.

So Democrats are spending more money but not moving public opinion in their favor?

That's a win, they figure?

Meanwhile -- don't believe that crap about early voting. You already know that the GOP is absolutely pounding the Democrats in early voting in Florida (extending their lead by 0.75% today); I'll post about Nevada and Oregon later.

The polls are so wrong that Democrats held a secret meeting to discuss Nancy Pelosi's successor, reports Ben Whedon of JustTheNews.com.

With the midterm elections fast approaching and Republicans poised to take control of the House of Representatives, Democratic lawmakers are looking for their next leader to succeed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi is running for reelection to her congressional seat, though a Republican victory in the midterms would remove her as speaker.

Other Democrats, however, see an opening to claim the party's top leadership post in the lower chamber. Amid growing chatter that California Rep. Adam Schiff was interested in taking the reins of party leadership, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries called a meeting of party leaders to discuss the matter, Politico reported.

Schiff built a public profile during the Trump administration as a leading promoter of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and a major player in the Trump impeachment efforts. He further served on the House Jan. 6 committee. Jeffries reportedly grew nervous about a potential threat from Schiff to his own ambitions.

In a Sept. 1 meeting, Jeffries met with Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina, to discuss how best to handle Schiff's potential campaign. During that meeting, Jeffries reportedly found an ally in Clyburn for a potential leadership bid of his own.

The polls are so wrong that Ice Cream Joe is plotting how he can spin a huge loss as a moral victory.

John Sexton, excerpting from the Washington Post:

One House Democratic strategist said that if Democrats hold 200 to 205 seats, they will consider it a good night. If the party ends up with 190 seats or less -- a loss of 30 seats that would require several districts Biden carried by double-digits to flip -- that would reflect a big red wave, said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Biden allies are preparing to spin even a defeat as a win for the president, since President Barack Obama lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trump lost 40 in 2018, and Biden is not expected lose as many. But because Biden began his presidency with a much smaller majority than his predecessors, even modest losses could leave Democrats with fewer seats than the 193 they had in 2011.

Puck also reports on Biden's "Doom Prepping."

Biden Doomsday Prepping

The White House spin machine is in overdrive as Biden's inner circle debates how to message a possible midterm "shellacking" without acknowledging that it might somehow be their fault.

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People close to the White House say they are loath to issue a mea culpa, and the messaging gurus want to steer the gaffe-happy, speak-from-the-heart president toward a message that transcends himself. "Everything that happens in that first 24 hours after the elections impacts the lame duck session, the next two years of his presidency, and ultimately the 2024 election," said a source close to the White House. "They don't have a vested interest in saying they were wrong."

...

"I just don't see them taking responsibility," said a Democratic strategist. "I think it's going to be hard to accept that they lost the midterms because of them."

I'm told the White House is leaning toward delicately arguing (positioning, as they say here) that the results would have been different if Congress had been able to pass his very popular legislation earlier into his term, so that voters could have felt the effects before going to the polls. Of course, this is also a dig at camera-mugging, foot-dragging moderates, like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who just wouldn't support his F.D.R.-ish $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill, rather than an admission that the president's agenda was his own version of Obamacare--perhaps too ambitious and mismanaged by Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who wasted far too much time negotiating with progressives, like Pramila Jayapal. I've also heard that Bidenworld wants to position the inflationary pressures as exogenous and beyond anyone's control, especially after Covid.

Biden might not want to accept blame, but the leftwing establishment is ready to mete it out to them, to drive Biden out of pretending he's running in 2024:

Erick Erickson @EWErickson Nov 1

I had multiple reporters in DC tell me last week the Times is working on a big post-election piece about Biden's frailties sourced with White House staffers. Expected to drop after the election.

I don't know about any of that, but the Paper of Democrat Propaganda has admitted that as Biden's political position has become more desperate, he has resorted to more frequent and more brazen lies.

As Elections Approach, Biden Spins His Economic Record

The president's recent comments on Social Security, the deficit and economic growth claim credit where it is not always due.

White House officials have sometimes been forced to awkwardly correct President Biden's claims. Other times, they have doubled down on them.

By Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley

WASHINGTON -- As President Biden has told it in recent months, America has the fastest-growing economy in the world, his student debt forgiveness program passed Congress by a vote or two, and Social Security benefits became more generous thanks to his leadership.

None of that was accurate.

The president, who has long been seen as embellishing the truth, has recently overstated his influence on the economy, or omitted key facts. This week, Mr. Biden praised himself for giving retirees a raise during a speech in Florida.

As Ringside at the Reckoning points out, Trump lies and destroys our fragile public trust -- but Biden merely "embellishes the truth."

"On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks," he declared. The problem: That increase was the result of an automatic cost-of-living increase prompted by the most rapid inflation in 40 years. Mr. Biden had not done anything to make retirees' checks bigger -- it was just a byproduct of the soaring inflation that the president has vowed to combat. In stops across the country in recent weeks, Mr. Biden has also credited himself with bringing down the federal budget deficit -- the gap between what America owes and what it earns.

"This year the deficit, under our leadership, is falling by $1.4 trillion," he said last week in Syracuse, N.Y. "Ladies and gentlemen, the largest ever one-year cut in American history on the deficit."

Left unsaid was the fact that the deficit was so high in the first place because of pandemic relief spending, including a $1.9 trillion economic aid package the president pushed through Congress in 2021 and which was not renewed. Mr. Biden was in effect claiming credit for not passing another round of emergency assistance.
White House officials contend that robust tax receipts, which helped reduce the deficit, are largely the result of strong economic growth that was supported by Mr. Biden's economic policies.

...

[A]s it gets closer to midterm elections that will determine the fate of the rest of Mr. Biden's legislative agenda, the president's cheerleading has increasingly grown to include exaggerations or misstatements about the economy and his policy record.
White House officials have sometimes been forced to awkwardly correct Mr. Biden's claims. Other times, they have doubled down on them.

Trump's lies threaten they very foundations of our civil society.

Biden makes "misstatements."

Senior administration officials acknowledged that the president and other administration officials have unintentionally misspoken about the economy on occasion but denied that Mr. Biden or his administration had ever attempted to mislead the public about the economy. They said that his record requires no overstating.

"The president's economic agenda has given us an economy with historic job creation, faster declines in unemployment than prior recoveries, and private sector investments in new industries throughout the country," Abdullah Hasan, a White House spokesman, said. "Where on occasion we have misspoken, as any human is allowed once in a while, we have acknowledged and corrected or clarified such honest mistakes."

Mr. Biden's economic exaggerations generally pale in comparison to the tales spun by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump. The former president, whose lies included insisting that he did not lose the 2020 election and that the Capitol was not attacked by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, regularly boasted of "the greatest economy in the history of the world" -- a statement not based on any facts.

Except for, you know, plainly observable reality. The economy may or may not have been "The greatest in the history of the world," a vague statement with no clear parameters. But one, that kind of boast is called "puffery," and is legally not a lie because you can't define exactly what is being asserted, and two, Trump's economy really was at least one of the greatest economies in the history of the world and would be discussed in any list of great economies in the modern era.

But the New York Times thinks that's a lie -- but thinks that all of spin by Biden's flack about how great Biden's economy is is 100% accurate, not puffery.

And not lies.

...

Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a former Obama administration economic adviser, said some of Mr. Biden's recent contentions appeared to be the types of "leaps of logic" that were common during election seasons. He pointed to the president's claims of reducing the deficit and overseeing an increase in Social Security payments as examples.

"This isn't like making stuff up," Mr. Furman said. "It's just making a rather stretched and peculiar causal argument around true facts."

Uh-huh.

He added that Mr. Biden's messaging bore no comparison to the falsehoods Mr. Trump used to tell about America being among the highest-taxed nations in the world, an inaccurate declaration given the far higher tax rates in countries such as France, Denmark and Belgium.

"Among" is a word that apparently means "not among."

...

But as the United States has struggled to contain inflation, the Biden administration has at times resorted to cherry-picking the most favorable data points or leaving out crucial context. In some cases, it has been a matter of presenting graphics that do not tell the whole story.

For instance, a White House chart late last year depicted a decline in gas prices over a month as a significant drop. However, the rows of plunging bars showed a decrease of just 10 cents.

Inflation has been the most slippery subject, with Biden administration officials often focusing on different measures as they seek silver linings in monthly reports.
Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, appeared to misstate the figures in an interview with CNN last month when she was pressed about why "core" inflation, which excludes food and energy prices, was at its highest level in 40 years in September.

"So, if one looks month on month, it was actually flat," Ms. Rouse said.

The monthly rate had actually risen by 0.6 percent, a significant increase. The administration said that Ms. Rouse had misspoken and intended to say that core inflation was unchanged for two consecutive months, not that it was zero.

Mr. Biden's comment to Jimmy Kimmel in June about America's rapid economic growth being the fastest in the world was contradicted by an International Monetary Fund report in July that showed several countries in Europe and Asia were growing faster than the United States this year. The fund predicted at the time that the United States would grow at a sluggish 2.3 percent in 2022 and further downgraded its outlook last month. In this case, the administration said that Mr. Biden was referring to the pace of America's recovery from the pandemic compared to other major economies.

The more recent presidential pronouncement at a forum in October that the student debt relief program passed Congress was perhaps the most head-scratching. It was starkly at odds with the reality that Mr. Biden rolled out the initiative through executive action and that it was being challenged in the courts. A White House official said that Mr. Biden was referring to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which did not include student debt relief.

And when Mr. Biden said in September gas prices were averaging below $2.99 a gallon in 41 states and the District of Columbia, they were actually $1 higher. The White House corrected the transcript of his remarks and said it was a one-time unintended slip.

Grampa Funnyfingers sure does seem to be making a lot of one-time unintended slips lately.

Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec

Joy Reid is admitting she didn't know what inflation meant until this year

posted by Ace at 05:21 PM

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