The MeidasTouch Podcast - Trump GETS VERY BAD DATA on Election After LOSING DEBATE (Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier Interview)

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas interviews the top election data experts in the field Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier about the latest polling data on Donald Trump and VP Kamala Harris. Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! Join the MeidasTouch Patreon: https://Patreon.com/meidastouch Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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who leads the Hopium Chronicles, and Tom Bonior, Senior Advisor at Target Smart. You will all recall Midas Mighty. We had Simon and Tom on the Midas Touch Network back in 2022 when all of the corporate media was pushing the red wave narrative. I would say one of the most pivotal points of the growth of the Midas Touch Network, I think, is when we brought Simon and Tom onto this network and they were pushing back. And there was this tug of war, if you will, with the corporate media and others saying that we had no clue what we were talking about. We were being trashed until we were proven that actually when you look at the data, when you look at the statistics and you don't just buy into narratives

blindly, that actually matters. So let's dig into it right now. This is going to be a recurring series here on the Midas Touch Network. Welcome, Simon. Welcome, Tom. So Simon, post-debate your immediate reactions. where are we right now what's the data suggesting then tom will go to you yeah listen we had a phenomenal week and we are being led by an incredibly capable candidate in a really strong campaign i mean this has been a remarkable series of events that i think would have been rejected as a west wing episode if they had tried to or a season of west Wing if they had tried to script it. But we're coming out very strong. And let me just go right into the data of where we are, I think. And then, Tom, we can turn it to you on the Voter Reg stuff, is that prior to the

debate, what was unusual about the data, the polling data, was that everything was sort of pointing in the same direction. There were very few outliers. Usually data is kind of scattered all over the place. It was in 2022 when we were coming on here. But the data has been remarkably consistent in recent weeks. Harris has a two to three point national lead. The congressional generic, which measures how people are going to vote for Congress, we have a two to three point national lead. The states, we are in better shape than they are. We're closer to 270. We're not where we want to be, but we're in better shape than Trump is in the seven battleground states. In the Senate polling, which is going to be very important, particularly in the battleground Senate districts, we're doing very,

very well. The tester race in Montana, I think, is a toss-up. Some people think we're behind there. I don't agree from conversations I've had with people. And, you know, the Republicans have bad candidate problems, again, in the Senate battlegrounds and in the North Carolina governor's race that I think is going to become much more important as we get closer to the election. And most importantly is that we also, and if let's just say that we're up a little bit, we've got a slight advantage, we have a huge advantage in money, volunteers, and enthusiasm. And this is going to, I think, make it possible for us to close strong, close stronger than them. And I think Kamala Harris's strong hand this week got stronger

with her great debate performance and Donald Trump exposing himself, reminding all of us about what an ugly and extreme and unfit and unwell candidate he really is. I think she did herself a lot of good. He did himself a lot of harm. So where I stand today, Ben, is that I would much rather be us than them. And I'm very optimistic that we're going to have the election we all want to have if we go to work and do the work. Tom Bonior, want to turn it over to you, your reaction post-debate. Also, you've been doing a lot of studies into enthusiasm and specifically as it relates post-debate as well, you've been focusing on the Taylor Swift effect, but let's just give your overall reaction, if you will.

Yeah. I mean, if we can connect some dots here and you mentioned going back to 2022 and the sort of work we did here on this network and pushing back on this red wave narrative that was based on this notion that sure, polling is important, but it has to be viewed in the context of what else is happening. And what we were seeing at the time, especially first in the voter registration data, then in special election results,

and then in early vote data was, it didn't look like a red wave election. And I don't mean that from some sort of vague sense of how something feels or the vibes as people like to talk about, meaning hardcore data analysis where this isn't the first election we've seen. And so we know what voter registration looks like in a red wave election. We know what early vote looks like.

And that wasn't it. It's why we had the confidence to really put that message out there and why in the end, everyone on this program was correct. And so the question of what we're seeing now, first, if we can, talking about this period even prior to the debate at the beginning of the Harris candidacy, where we know, sure, Democrats did have some signs in the data of lagging intensity and enthusiasm prior to that moment. I think we believe the campaign would be able to rectify, but certainly was something that really existed.

So what we did is we looked at the voter registration data right after that candidate change, and we saw what we've been beginning to call the Harris effect. It's really sort of an add on to what we call the Dobbs effect in 2022. It's the same phenomenon with a lot of the same people where you're seeing these big increases in voter registration among young

voters, women, and voters of color. And when you combine those three, when you look at young women of color, you're seeing increases in registration that are truly unbelievable. In some cases, triple the rate of registration that we saw four years earlier during the same period. But talking about the debate, as Simon said, sure, the polls have been remarkably consistent. They show a close race, but a consistent advantage for Vice President Harris. The big question that we don't see, that we can't learn from the polls, is who's going to vote? Know a little bit about how they're going to vote. That's where we look at this intensity data, voter registration. And seeing the registration numbers, and this is early, you talk about the Swift effect,

but we know it's the sort of one-two punch where we saw a great debate performance followed up by Taylor Swift telling her followers or hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram to go out and register to vote well our team has hard data where we can actually look and see people who are coming to our file the people are registering voters hitting against our file to see what's happening and what we saw was a more than quadrupling of these voter registration checks coming to us these spikes in in registration attempts that

started immediately following the debate in Taylor Swift's Instagram post that have now actually continued days later. We saw Taylor Swift at the VMAs telling people to register to vote, and we saw a spike from that. So this intensity enthusiasm is really unprecedented at this point. It's even bigger than what we saw after the Dobbs decision in 2022 and is, yeah, incredibly remarkable. I mean, it was remarkable, bigger than what we're seeing with the intensity. If it's bigger than Dobbs, that could be a tsunami. But there was a tsunami of really bad polling in 2022 to kind of game the system. One of the reflections, Simon, on the red wave that you and Tom were at the forefront calling out, as frankly, corporate media was taking shots at both of you, is you were saying there's a lot of very bad polling data out there that looks intentional.

It looks malicious. And you were often called, oh, he's going down a conspiracy rabbit hole. But you were shown that that's correct. Are we starting to see that again? What should our viewers be looking for there? Yeah, just an exclamation point on something Tom said, and then I'll get to that, is that we looked at these measures of intensity in 2022, the performance of Democrats in special elections, the amount of fundraising that, you know, the huge fundraising advantages we had, and then the voter reg and then

the early vote. And when you use those same measures in this election, I mean, as Tom was saying, we're seeing, you know, because it all pointed towards the Democrats having heightened intensity and Republicans not. And this is why we were kind of confident that we were going to do better than people expected. We're seeing that exact same thing happen this time, right? We're seeing continued strong performances in all these off-year and special elections. We're seeing the heightened performance in, you know, we're out dramatically out-raising the Republicans in hard dollars all across the country. And, you know, we're now seeing it in the voter reg data. And this is a big change.

And as Tom mentioned, we also are starting to see polling of enthusiasm, which we're a little skeptical of. But Gallup has data going back many decades about enthusiasm and the way they measure it. And in their last poll, we had an enthusiasm gap of 14 points over the Republicans. And the last time we were this high, close to 80% in their measure, was in the Obama 08 election. Far higher levels of measured intensity than we had, for example, in the recent presidential elections or even in the 2022 midterms. So there is a lot of confirming data now that those same indicators of intensity that Tom talked about are also pointing again towards us.

And we're going to learn a lot in the early vote, which begins in just a week. The early in-person voting across the country begins in just a week. And so we're going to start getting data about how people are voting in this election soon. Tom should talk about the website he's going to build to help us understand all that. But on the polling, I do think that what happened in 2022 is that in the battleground states, in the Senate races, the Republicans flooded the zone with these polls. There were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done, the independent media polls that were being done. And they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right, more Republican.

And so Real Clear Politics, for example, which has a very simple way of producing averages, their final map of the race had Republicans winning 54 Senate seats based on the polling averages that had been gained by Republican polling operations. And the Republicans only won 49 seats. So we know that in 2022, there was an effort to create the impression of the red wave. It actually was successful because it moved the polling averages into places where it looked like Republicans were going to win. And it was done through them hiring and paying a bunch of Republican polling outfits to do this. And they did it in the states because there are fewer polls in the states. So it's easier to push the average. It's much harder to do it in the national vote

where there are so many polls. And some of those same polling outfits that have been doing no public polling for the last two years have returned in recent weeks, doing battleground, and particularly in the last few days, doing battleground state polls, WIC, Insider Advantage, Trafalgar, Patriot polling. There was a fifth that I'm just spacing out on that I'll think of in a second, who've started producing polls in the battleground states, and they're going to focus heavily on Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, in all likelihood, showing their number is two, three, four points more Republican than all the other polling. So it's literally the exact same thing. We cannot be bamboozled by this again.

The whole national media kind of bought into this effort to gain the polling average. And the reason it matters, let me just say quickly, the reason it matters is a couple of things. One is it demobilized. When we think we're losing, we demobilize. Our voters disengage. Money dries up, right? The same is true for them if they think they're losing. So one is they want to give Donald Trump and Republican voters a belief the election is better than it

really is. The second thing, though, that's important is that it is vital to Donald Trump's effort. If he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election. And so there's also a deeply pernicious, I mean, not in addition to the, you know, just the perniciousness of gaming polling and misleading people, because these Republican polling outfits, we don't produce this kind of polling because we use all of our money to win elections. They have somehow decided to spend millions and millions of dollars on these polls. And the question is, why would you do it if it's anything other than helping them win elections? They're not trying to inform the electorate. They're trying to

win the election by gaming the polling averages. And I think this time, what we have to be worried about, and the reason we have to call this out, is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning. So if he loses, he can say we cheated. And so there's a lot of significance into what's going on here and something, Ben, that we'll be coming back and talking about in the coming weeks. But we have to be wise and learn from what happened last time and call bullshit on what's going on here with these fake Republican polls. So, Tom, we've been talking about the red wave narrative from 2022 that was false that you and Simon debunked. I want to maybe talk about something that happened relatively sooner back in February of 2024 when we were seeing a lot of these primaries and Donald Trump underperforming the averages. One of the posts that you made back on February 27th, 2024

was, are we going to add yet another state to the quote, Trump underperforms the polls pile? So far, the New York Times needle is predicting Trump plus 43. The latest 538 poll average was Trump plus 57. And then you answered it the next day. The answer is yes. Trump's 42 point margin in Michigan fell 15 points short of the final 538 poll average, he continues to underperform. 15 points sounds statistically significant of a number to me. And I know a lot of our viewers out there are hearing 538 this, 538. And what was so odd about this to me, Tom, is that after Trump underperformed by 15 points to 538 in a key state like Michigan, I remember all the press was

camped out in certain areas of Michigan to try to show that that was going to be the data for Biden. And that never happened. But then when they were wrong by 15, it was like, whatevs, move on to the next one. And we saw that in state after state, you were covering that. So what conclusions can we read from that? What do you make of that? What do you think about that just being ignored? Just if you can talk about that. Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because this is an incredibly important point for people to understand that I think has significant bearing on our understanding of the election

over the closing several weeks here. Again, going back to 2022 for a second, if we remember in the aftermath, the general, quote, smart take was, well, the polls weren't so bad as long as you didn't pay attention to those red wave polls that Simon mentioned, that everyone was telling us you had to pay attention to at the time and, quote, trust the averages. But they said what the problem was, was a level of analysis, meaning we had a couple of elections prior to that, 2016 and 2020, where the polls did overestimate Democratic support. So there is this sort of political chattering class notion that polls just were broken and they underestimated Republicans. And in the end,

what we know that happened in 2022 is polls overestimated Republican support. And as Simon has pointed out many times, thankfully, and we need to continue to point out, is since the Dobbs decision, we have this continued track record of Republicans underperforming, underperforming previous benchmarks and underperforming polling. And so you brought this up in the primary. To me, this is the best example. Donald Trump, who, you know, people will tell you still today. Sure, Vice President Harris is leading in the poll averages and enough states to get her well above 270 electoral votes. But in the end, Donald Trump overperforms polling because that's what happened in 2016 and 2020. It's a fallacy. And again, the most recent example we have is universally throughout these primaries where Donald Trump badly underperformed the polls.

And so at this point, can we say with certainty one way or another? We can't. But we have to keep in mind the most recent track record, and this is not just these primaries. Again, this is special elections. This is the 2022 midterms. This is the elections in Virginia in 2023. Consistently, Republicans are underperforming. All of the data that we have at this point suggests that they will underperform again. It's backed up by this registration data. We will be very curious to look at the early vote data as that becomes available. Simon and I, of course, will be digging into that as we have in prior cycles. And in the end, that'll likely be our best indicator.

And we will be covering that every step of the way here. We're going to have you both back on. Final statements from each of you. Let me go back to Simon, your closing remarks on this video. But again, just reminding everybody, we will be back weekly. And as we get closer, probably daily. Well, I think, well, if we're coming back daily, we'll all go crazy, I think. But the, yeah, listen, I think the last thing that Tom said is really important. It's foundational to

our understanding of this election, that everything changed in spring of 2022 when Dobbs happened. It was a before and after moment. And it means that what happened in 2016 and 2020 is not as important potentially as what happened in 2022. That, you know, we've always believed that this election would look more like 2022 than it did 2016 and 2020 because Trump is different than he was in 2016 and 2020. He's, you know, January 6th happened. He tried to overturn American democracy and, you know, overturn an election to end American democracy for all time. He stripped the rights and freedoms away of more than half the population. He himself, as we saw

this week, is far more degraded and diminished and impulsive and wild and mad than he was in 2016 and 2020. And he's now also a rapist, a felon, a traitor, and a fraudster. And so the version of Trump that we're seeing this time is far worse and extreme and ugly than the Trump, the version of Trump we've been seeing before. And if the country had rejected that politics, the MAGA, you know, of 2018, 2020, 2022, why would they embrace a politics that's uglier and more extreme this time? It always sort of defied logic in some ways about and understanding because in our analysis, what we talked a lot about in 2022, Ben, was that you needed to stay close to the data about this election, not what happened in other elections, previous elections. No election is like any other election. This election is going to be like 2024. It's not going to be like 2016 and 2020. And what we're going through with you today is the data about what's happening in this election. When Tom talked about Trump underperforming public polling in this election with voters this year,

that to me should be at least as important, if not more important, than what happened in 2016 and 2020. But this is the kind of stuff that isn't left. It's left out of the dialogue. And it's why it's important that we're being given the opportunity to talk to the Midas Mighty about this, because all of you have become such an important part of our family. This has have become such an important part of our family this has really become such an important institution in the pro-democracy movement and we want to make sure we're giving you the best data that we possibly can so that you are informed and can share this with others at this critical time for our country so it's great to be back with you ben

and by the way good luck i know you're about to be a dad and that's pretty exciting. Why do you think I was saying I'm going to have you on here daily? I'm going to start having you on hourly while I'm taking care of my kids. You didn't realize it, but that was the true art of the deal. I was booking you without you even knowing it. Tom, your final conclusion. Yeah. Well, again, I want to echo what Simon what simon said so thankful for everything you and the might is mighty uh network are doing here uh you know in terms of that data i do actually want to share uh with with everyone here some some breaking news that we have not shared publicly yet but in terms of this voter registration data data we're big believers that uh more information that empowers the electorate is better, right?

Especially with all of the misinformation out there in the mainstream media. And so we will be releasing a public dashboard that anyone can go to. If you go to TargetSmart.com, it'll be up before the end of the week. And you can actually run your own voter registration analysis. It's all on there. It's very easy to use. A shout out to our team at Target Smart for the work they have done. And then later this month, we will be releasing the

Target Early Dashboard that will bring in early vote data. So we're excited to share that with the network here and excited to come back. Thank you. This network will continue to grow because we just want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but it. Give us the data. That's my Jerry Maguire appeal. Show me the data. Everybody hit subscribe. We're on our way to 4 million subscribers. Let's get there before election. Thanks everybody for watching and have a good one. Real quick, MediGist changed their algorithm to suppress political content. Please follow our Instagram at Midas Touch right now as we head towards 400,000 followers so you don't miss a beat.