There are two kinds of polls: the “internals” and the “public polls,” also called “media polls” and “independent polls,” although they are hardly independent.
Internal polls are paid for by individual campaigns, parties, or super PACs. They tend to be more accurate, because the last thing campaigns want to do is lie to themselves. The results from these polls rarely make it into the public domain, but you can sometimes see what they’re telling the campaigns by how the candidate is acting.
My colleague Matt Margolis exposed a great example of this in Abdul El-Sayed Senate campaign in Michigan. Matt laid out in detail how El-Sayed has been ramming the message home about “Medicare for All,” which must be falling flat, because as Matt noted, “Now El-Sayed is suddenly all for people staying on private insurance if they want to. ‘If you would like to have a private insurer, above that, you're welcome to do that,’ El-Sayed says now, channeling his inner Barack Obama.”
What this dramatic pivot illustrates is that either the El-Sayed campaign is not faring as well as advertised by the left and the legacy media (and their polls), or the “Medicare for All” issue has become a liability for the candidate.
Abdul El-Sayed is a liar.
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 26, 2026
El-Sayed has already called to completely eliminate private insurance at least 10 times. https://t.co/66BzAxjAXO pic.twitter.com/zuEC0B7C83
Clearly, the internals are telling the campaign something that the public polls are not saying.
So, what are “public polls"? Those are the ones everyone in the news media is talking about incessantly right now. Leftist universities, NGOs, media organizations, activist groups, and others pay for them. They serve a very specific purpose, one every conservative should already know.
Public polls are designed to shape public opinion, not reflect it. They are designed to discourage conservative and Republican voters and embolden Democrat and leftist voters. They want to disenfranchise you. They want you to give up and decide not to vote, because they want you to feel that voting this time around is pointless. They want to suppress the vote for Republican candidates.
If a legacy media organization, including Fox News, attaches its name to a public poll, ignore it, especially right now. Between now and the final week before the election, pollsters will oversample Democrat voters and leftists to tilt the scales in favor of Democrat candidates. They will structure the questions to favor the Democrats. They will talk mostly to Democrats. They will shut out Republican candidates and ignore Republican and independent voters.
The Wall Street Journal provides us with a perfect example of how public polls are used to discourage you into giving up.
President Trump’s approval rating drops to 37% in a WSJ poll, the lowest of any president heading into a midterm election in Journal polls dating to 1990. 🔗 https://t.co/4CGJ8WscDh pic.twitter.com/haG1MGKPoM
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 28, 2026
Back in 2024, Matt Margolis wrote about another now-infamous “suppression poll” in Iowa that had Kamala Harris trouncing Trump in the state. Right before Election Day, Matt blew the lid off of those sketchy Iowa poll results coming out of Iowa when he wrote:
I warned you about suppression polls, and the mother of all suppression polls appears to have just dropped.
And it's not even from a swing state.
The latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll just dropped, and it claims that Kamala Harris has a three-point lead in Iowa.
‘Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory," the Des Moines Register reports. "A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.’
The Des Moines Register relied on veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer for a very long time up, until that poll. The poll Matt covered was her last one. She stopped doing election polling after this because President Donald Trump ended up winning the state by 13 points. The newspaper’s disgraceful “suppression survey” backfired on the left in a very red state.
One of the things the Des Moines Register did not do in 2024, but most legacy media organizations do during an election cycle, is shore up their results in the final days prior to the election. If you notice, the polls tend to tighten up right before the election. That’s mostly because pollsters can't afford to be wrong like Selzer was. They know they have to make sure their final polls before Election Day are more accurate so that no one can accuse them of being wrong or biased once the votes are counted.
But before that, pollsters will give themselves plenty of grace to weaponize their polls to suppress voter turnout among conservatives and boost voter turnout for Democrats.
Now that we’re just about to head into October, this would be a very good time to ignore those polls. Don't forget that only one poll counts: the one where you fill out a ballot and turn it in.
