As the Conservative Treehouse linked to the results of the Harvard-Harris monthly poll we find three very encouraging results. Look at the answer percentages on these three questions:
Do you think current border security is adequate or inadequate? 61% Inadequate / 39% Adequate
Do you support or oppose building a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S.-Mexico border? 60% Support / 40% Oppose
Do you think that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, known as ICE, should be disbanded or not? 31% Disbanded / 69% Not Disbanded
And this poll skews to the left with 37% Democrat, 32% Republican and 29% Independent. Look at that number, 60% support building a wall. That represents basically all the Republicans and all the Independents. But if you go to the Harris Poll site and look up Harvard Harris you’ll see this headline:
“Latest Harvard-Harris Poll Finds More than 6 in 10 Registered Voters Oppose Border Wall Between U.S. and Mexico.”
But that’s the opposite result. How can that be? Well the poll they tout was taken back in April and preceded this one. But wait a minute, you might say, how could 20% of the country change its mind in a month or two? And you would be right. That doesn’t happen. The older poll reflects what we’ve been fed from pollsters for the last decade. Americans want more immigration and they love those whacky, fun-loving drug runners from M13. We can’t get enough of their idiosyncratic drive by machine gunning and intimidation of our high school children. What’s not to love?
So how did the new headline occur? I don’t think you’ll find a documented answer that makes sense. I’ll give you my theory.
The narrative collapsed.
The people who put out these polls have a pretty wide latitude when it comes to selecting the participants, phrasing the questions and massaging the data they receive. And I think they use this elasticity to produce results like the 99.9% certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. So, I’m guessing that the difference between the April poll and the June poll was relatively large, not twenty percent but maybe five percent. But my guess is that the real percentages in those two polls were 65% and 70%. But you’d say, wait a minute, that’s impossible. How could a 65% majority for the wall be turned into a 40% minority? That’s a 25% inaccuracy. And why then would they not just adjust the 70% to 45%. My theory is they’ve been maintaining the same narrative that they fabricated to prop up the Obama presidency and they juiced it as hard as they could during the Clinton campaign and they held out hope that the Resistance would bring down Trump’s popularity and allow his presidency to collapse. But the numbers keep moving farther and farther in the other direction and now they’re literally afraid of being caught cooking the books and losing their gig. After all, other pollsters are already showing different results on these same poll questions and it must be getting a little thick for our friends at Harris and Gallup. They don’t want to be the ones flapping in the breeze when the next Brexit or Trumpocalypse occurs. It might mean having to get real jobs. So the jig is up and they’ll have to start only slightly slightly tipping the scales, let’s say 5 to 10%.
And that got me thinking, what would it look like if the narrative collapsed completely? And what would it take to cause that implosion? My guess is that what would cause the implosion would be the success of the Trump Revolution. Specifically, if the Republicans hold onto the House and expand their lead in the Senate and use this majority to provide President Trump with the funds to build the wall and enforce the immigration laws and the country supports this effort by re-electing him convincingly, then all of this would be enough to collapse the Narrative completely.
So this is the long answer for why those poll answers seem so different from expectations. But there’s a short answer too. A one-word answer. Trump.
Ever since the primary debates he’s been telling us the Emperor’s New Clothes are fake news. Jeb! told us that illegal immigration was love. Trump told us it was crime. The Media and the pollsters said Trump was part of a small, shrinking, bigoted minority. The election showed that wasn’t so. He keeps hammering away at the lies and evasions. And he’s definitely winning. And they know it. And now they know that we know it too.