The Games Pollsters Play

 

It’s a mistake to think we don’t have to worry ourselves about polls until the 2026 midterm campaigns begin in earnest. They’re being used right now to fill the gaps left by the news mass media doesn’t want to cover or investigate in any depth. What are people thinking about this and that? What should you be thinking if you’re one of the smart ones? Are you thinking what we want you to think yet?

I recently stumbled across a good example of how the polling game is played, even on what is supposed to be friendly turf. A source we can look at without the fingerprints of WAPO, the NYT, NPR, YouVote, Morning Consult, 538, Quinnipiac, or even Rasmussen (whom I have beaten on plenty for several years).

It’s my habit to be wary of the “nose under the tent” phenomenon. Even rampaging MAGA strongholds like Real America’s Voice (RAV) can be manipulated on a fairly regular basis. Why I’ve been hard on Breitbart for their continual publishing of interviews with old, retired, out-of-office names that are still recognizable but no longer cognitively coherent. Why I’ve been critical of RAV’s reliance on the cut rate news site called Just the News (JTN), which is infested not only with obstructive popup ads but a curious penchant for understatement when it comes to hot political controversies. John Solomon is the fossil in charge there, and he’s moldy enough to remember the soft-sell presentation of the alphabet news networks in the days of Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith. He hates to bare his teeth in print or on the air even when it’s warranted. But RAV has subcontracted the job of providing news crawlers on its shows to JTN. The subtitles are so tortuously written that it’s often hard to figure out what they’re trying to say. Except when they include some kind of off-key howler. Like the one I saw a few days ago.

Sneaked into a bunch of nearly indecipherable headline fare about the latest judiciary stays on Trump EOs was one that read “Most Americans hate the plane gift from Qatar…” Huh?

I scurried over to JTN to hunt down the headline. Fighting through all the popups and subcategories of their page, I found this:

Napolitan News Survey. Never heard of them. Key fact buried at the end the last sentence. “1,000 registered voters.” The concluding quote from Trump seems mocking, taken out of context. And “Hate” is a strong word for an opinion reported for 50 percent of voters in the population of voters that includes many who never vote and don’t follow the news.

Napolitan. Play on Neapolitan, the cover-the-waterfront ice cream product that puts vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry in the same box? A sincere outreach to all points of view maybe? So I looked them up.

When you go to your site, there’s no introduction or welcome message up top. Just a sampling of recent polling results they’re pleased to show you.

Honestly, this trio of headlines doesn’t tell us much. The first one is hardly news and says nothing about how people feel about it. The second is no surprise either. These are by no means the best days in our history for racial relations. Don’t need a survey to tell me there are big disagreements out there. The third one is about the same. Liking your own local cops is reminiscent of decades of polls showing us that while voters disapprove strongly of Congress, they tend to feel their own congressman is better than the awful average.

It’s all something that looks like information but isn’t. I looked farther, where I struck pay dirt. The Main Page consists of summaries of about three dozen topics registered voters were asked about. Many of them seem like MAGA red meat and the results reflect that, more closely in some instances than I’d expect. But there are also some outlier questions and results. See what you think of these. And then I’ll tell you what I think of.

Most of these are leading questions, smuggling in the idea that there probably is a right way to think, and worry, about this. For me, the second topic was all I needed to solve the “What is Napolitan?” question. There’s no corollary question about whether anyone thinks the federal courts are violating the Constitution. These are the questions of someone who agrees with many of Trump’s policies but fears and dislikes Trump himself. He’s ignoring the Constitution, he might cancel elections forever, he’s on the take in ways we can see and will never see, and he’s running the budgeting process like a con game, fooling people with tricky, coded language. Can’t you all see these things if we ask you about them?

I got serious about looking for the name behind the site. Here’s all you get:

I didn’t need him to come clean. I knew who he was. Napolitan is code for Andrew Napolitano, the longtime talk show Judge on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. I’ve been watching his act for a quarter century now. His circular legal doubletalk inspired me to caricature him, on video, in Shuteye Nation (2001). Here’s a revised (updated) version of what I drew satirically back then.

Click here for the Rumble Video. It’s funny and serious.

Now I can explain why I began with the video up top. Our Guest of Honor in this post:

Napolitano is a piece of work. Here’s the obligatory Wiki proof of importancy:

Notable facts? Born on the anniversary of D-Day, Jersey boy (we’re everywhere, honestly), Princeton boy with a law degree from the same institution that gave us Amy Coney Barrett, for whom he is not responsible. Significantly, he does not list himself as a Republican but a Libertarian. Is that important? Yes. IMHO. My observation is that Libertarians who claim the label are united more by their mindset as contrarians than anything else. Politically, they tend to be snipers, picking and choosing pet issues they’d be willing to die on a hill for, though they almost never do. Any issue of Reason Magazine can demonstrate the validity of my observations. Their favorite pursuit is mind games where they control the debate because they brought the subject up in the first place, usually from an unexpected direction. Rand Paul and his father before him are not Republicans either, regardless of what their résumés say. They are Libertarians who also seek political power, which is an anomaly in a population that consists mostly of people who want to be left alone with a bagful of weed and a girlfriend who likes argumentative dorks. 

Not how I’d characterize Andrew Napolitano. I think his particular fetish is finding numerous hills people can see you bravely defending without actually having to die for any them. 

For once, the Wiki fondness for looking under various rocks for compromising material about anyone widely regarded as conservative comes in handy here. Things you may not have known by watching The Judge schmoozing with Steve Doucy, Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, and the Five (different from what you’d maybe find at MSNBC, CNBC, AND CNN):

With respect to both presidents Bush and Obama and their handling of civil liberties in the War on Terror, Napolitano is a strong critic. In both his scholarly work, appearing in the New York University School of Law, Journal of Law and Liberty, and in his book Suicide Pact, he criticized the actions of both presidents and their parties concerning torture, domestic spying, unilateral executive action and encroachments on political power.

 

In February 2014, Napolitano expressed disdain for Abraham Lincoln on Fox News, saying, "I am a contrarian on Abraham Lincoln." Slavery in the U.S., according to Napolitano, while one of the most deplorable institutions in human history, could have been done away with peacefully, sparing the bloodiest conflict in American history. At the same time, he also argued that states, where slavery was legal, did not secede out of fear of abolitionism, asserting that "largely the impetus for secession was tariffs," which most Civil War historians dispute. In his book Suicide Pact, he focused his criticism of Lincoln on the precedent set by his specific constitutional violations, such as his unilateral suspension of the right to habeas corpus and his institutionalization of military commission systems for civilian crimes.

After the release of the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Napolitano said the report showed that Trump engaged in numerous instances of obstruction of justice. However, the report deliberately refused to make a firm conclusion about obstruction of justice accusations.

 

According to The New York Times, Napolitano "has a taste for conspiracy theories". The Washington Post has described him as a "purveyor of conspiracy theories."

 

In 2010, Napolitano said, "It's hard for me to believe that it (7 World Trade Center) came down by itself... I am gratified to see that people across the board are interested. I think twenty years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us."

This little rundown of his pet causes and propensities provides a good explanation for his positions vis á vis Trump. His fondness for conspiracy theories made him suspect that despite Hillary’s involvement, the Steele Dossier probably contained some elements of nefarious truth. Why he, like millions of other Trump haters, waited eagerly for a couple of years for a major criminal indictment from the Mueller investigation. He likely also interpreted Mueller’s failure to hit Trump with obstruction charges as an echo of Comey’s refusal to prosecute Hillary. He was thus blind to the fact that in the case of a fraudulently conceived investigation, lacking any crime from which other crimes could flow, obstruction charges would have constituted the “fruit of the poison tree.” Worse, Mueller and his staff could not afford the discovery process Trump would have been entitled to in defending himself against an obstruction prosecution. Two years in which the investigation consisted of leaving Trump hanging in PR hell while the Russia Russia lies settled in with no opportunity for refutation. 

Another clue buried in the Wiki bio. Napolitano claims to be a Constitutional originalist, in fact more originalist than Justices Scalia or Thomas. I think it goes deeper than that. His college thesis was titled ‘An Essay on the Origin and Evolution of Representative Government in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1630-1644.’ His ideal predates the Constitution, hearkening back to the colony governments whose first stab at a national government was the Articles of Confederation, which failed because the executive branch was too impotent to do anything. Why it was 86’ed in favor of what emerged from Independence Hall in 1789. The Judge is nostalgic for a federal conception that didn’t work then and wouldn’t work now. A strong Presidency makes him angry by its mere existence. Nothing to be done about that. He’s an old man, set in his even older ways.

Napolitano is allowed to believe whatever he wants. I just don’t trust his opinions about much, particularly about which questions are the most important ones to people who have to live in the world, not just pontificate about the world on TV. He will never be my go-to guy for comprehending and explaining what it is people really think and care about.

That’s actually how I feel about all pollsters. I know far too much about the polling process, the math of it, the role of topic selection and context, the manipulation of the wording and ordering of questions, the definition of sample sizes and populations, the invisible dangers of the questions not asked and the game-changing respondents not identified. A pollster is like the accountant asked by his hiring manager to compile an income statement. “Sure thing,” the accountant tells the manager. “Just tell me what you want the bottom line to be and I’ll give it to you in dollars and cents to the last penny.”

Andrew Napolitano wants us to agree with the broad outlines of the MAGA movement. And he wants to do it without Donald Trump. As soon as humanly possible.

Just the News probably feels the same way but much more mildly. Can’t we all just get along?