from Bill Still
lass=”” >Good morning, I’m still reporting on the invasion.
To make any good invasion work, you have to have the element of surprise. And to have the element of surprise, you have to control the flow of information to the public.
According to an insider at Nate Silver’s political advocacy group, 538, Donald Trump was right again. The system is rigged. The polls are rigged.
According to an Aug. 2 interview in “Real. True. News.”, an unnamed source at 538 says that despite the brave front Hillary Clinton continues to display to the public, Democrats are in an absolute panic because Donald Trump has taken a commanding lead in nearly all demographic groups.
But in the battle for hearts and minds, the information control game goes on without embarrassment about a basic lack of a tie to reality.
For example, yesterday’s headline on “FiveThirtyEight” was “Trump’s Slump Deepens in Polls.”
Therein, 538 head, Nate Silver, notes that Trump is trailing Clinton by 9 to 14 point margins now in the majority of big national polls, and he is predicting a Clinton win by 4 points on Nov. 8 and projects the odds of a Clinton win at 74% – her highest mark yet.
This despite the latest USC Daybreak poll showing a less than 1% margin. How is this possible?
Well, the insider gives us our first peek under the tent of Poll Control Central.
He tells a different story – one of nation-wide collusion with the Clinton machine and poll-buying, first whispered of during Trump’s primary run.
According to 538 guy:
“Nate [Silver] is a liberal. No secret there.
“It’s a big social club. The pollsters all work together.”
When the RTN reporter questioned the conspiratorial nature of that concept, the 538 insider said:
“Sure–what? You think it’s . . . random? Come on. Who do you think pays for the polls? People who want results.
“You’re buying media. It’s like ads or . . . I don’t know. Like newspaper stories? You pay 30k for a poll of Florida, it says what you want.”
Interestingly he chose Florida for his example because polls the day before the Florida primary showed the race between Trump and Rubio to be exceptionally close. But the next day, the vote turned out to be a Trump blowout.
538 guy then explained that Silver’s office is where the expectations of Clinton’s nationwide poll buys are managed.
“We have a Slack-room that’s sharing all kinds of results and skews and that’s how we keep it all orderly.”
“Oh–we drive it. You set the expectations ahead of time. It’s called pre-loading. You’d be surprised how we can fine-tune things. Mass belief is powerful.
“The problem here is … not everyone plays nice. Fox is rogue. Rasumssen was … bad. They were doing real polling.”
Then, 538 guy commented on the difficulty Poll Control had in dealing with the rising tide of Trump support:
“This time … Trump just caught us by surprise. The impact was so big – it came on so fast – Hillary just collapsed.”
“There were a few hours when the server was showing real projections and while traffic was pretty high, let me tell you, it was a melt-down politically.”
Then, 538 guy admitted that Nate Silver’s Poll Control Central gets its marching orders directly from the White House.
“[Nate Silver] was just really pissed. I mean he got a call from the White House telling him to fix it and sh*t.”
“Our business model is predicated on making liberals feel better about the election.”
“[Nate] had us look for bugs–something gone wrong–looking at the feeds. Of course nothing was wrong. Nothing had changed.
“Then he got on the phone with his people embedded with Q-Pac and Survey Monkey and PPP and all those guys–“
Then 538 guy predicted that the White House’s Stalinesque control of the information flow to the American people was coming unglued.
“I don’t know, man. There are a bunch of smaller groups out there doing real polls. I don’t know if anyone can keep this under wraps.”
Part of that is that their polls are so different from the available metrics on social media flows so favor Trump. We’ll take a look at that in our next report.
I’m still reporting from Washington. Good day.