The only poll that matters is the one on Election Day. So, after some stunning results in recent Democrat primaries, all eyes are on pre-election polling. Polls showed one thing, but the results turned out very different. Why?

Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong was the most glaring example. The radical Democratic Socialists of America candidate led virtually every poll of the gubernatorial primary — 20 points in the last RealClearPolitics average. Yet she lost.

Meanwhile, Michigan’s radical Islamist Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed won his Senate primary, but by a whisker despite an average polling lead of 10 points.

I cite those two races because those candidates have gotten so much attention. They’re both DSA and represent the radical leftist turn of the Democrat Party. But the polling was way off, and for a few important reasons.

First, in Hong’s case, she simply wasn’t doing the necessary work on the ground to persuade and turn out voters. The kerfuffle over her past comments no doubt hurt her, and her opponent, David Crowley, did do the hard work to win.

That didn’t stop Hong from insinuating that racism was at play, or that someone cheated. Which is almost hilarious for a Democrat to complain at this point.

Political analyst Gary Bauer points to a broader reason for the polling misfire: “Today, many Americans simply will not talk to pollsters. They don’t know if it’s a legitimate survey or some whacked-out group trying to get information that could hurt them.” The problem, he notes, goes back at least to 2016. “Fox News polls were some of the worst,” he recalls. “They were never able to capture the blue-collar wave that led Donald Trump to defeat the Bush and Clinton dynasties in 2016.”

Much digital ink has been spilled discussing the “shy Trump voter.” In essence, thanks to Trump Derangement Syndrome and its sometimes very real consequences, many of his supporters would rather keep it to themselves than tell the “enemy” media what they think.

That, in turn, is the effluent of something Mark Alexander wrote about decades ago. Dubbing it “pollaganda,” he defined it as “media polling used to manipulate public opinion and advance a particular bias.” How does it work? It relies on bandwagon psychology, and it functions in three stages: “first, saturating viewers with ‘reporting’ which reflects a doctrinal bias; second, designing and conducting public opinion surveys which reflect that bias; and third, further proselytizing viewers by treating media poll results as ‘news.’” Perhaps more Americans are becoming wise to this media strategy.

It’s also possible that the “shy voter” phenomenon is happening among Democrats for a similar reason.

The Left is famously intolerant, and the further left one goes, the more that’s true. If a “normal” Democrat fears the DSA but opposes its candidates, that person might not answer pollsters.

That’s one reason why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a DSA member, was out there earlier this week saying, “Woke 1 was crazy,” as she burst out in forced laughter.

Get it? What a knee-slapper!

Woke 1 WAS crazyyyy, Madame President https://t.co/pUHA2rtOQ1 pic.twitter.com/ws11dyPY1a

— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) August 9, 2026

Back here in reality, Woke 1 caused real harm to countless people who lost jobs or relationships, were censored, or otherwise suffered because of the woke mob’s intolerance. Why would those people answer pollsters about opposing DSA radicals?

AOC doesn’t get to just laugh it off and say, Oops, we got a little carried away!

Our Douglas Andrews also offered analysis on AOC’s remark and its implications, noting that she and others are trying to disown their own ideas because they’re not as popular as they’d like you to think. (Ahem, pollaganda.)

Of course, Democrats have been faking right and governing left for as long as I can remember. They pretend to be moderate or even commonsense conservative on the issues, only to get into office and do something else entirely. Or they couch the issues as some distorted form of compassion or empathy to hide the lunacy of it all. Transing kids, letting men play in women’s sports, and defunding the police are self-evidently insane until leftists go to great lengths to play on emotions and contort the issues.

Woke 1, which I guess AOC means the “first version” of Woke, was indeed crazy. Woke 2, if that’s what they’ve “upgraded” to, is even worse. She’s trying to obscure that fact by pretending they’ve learned their lesson.

Naturally, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked to weigh in on AOC’s comments. “I think that each person has a responsibility … to tell Americans when they’re running for office what they believe,” Mamdani said. “And sometimes, what you believe can change. It can develop. It can grow.”

Funny he should say that. “I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police,” he added. Yet in 2020, at the height of the George Floyd lies and racial division, he said, “The NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”

That really doesn’t poll well, so he has dialed it back. The same goes for many other DSA candidates. When they say what they really think, most Americans recoil. So, when they run for office, they pretend to be something else instead.

Is it any wonder, then, that the polling was wrong? Hong in particular said things on the campaign trail that were totally at odds with her past statements. Given that information, voters either didn’t show up for her or they changed their minds.

The same thing happened to Kamala Harris in 2024. The Washington Examiner reports, “Across swing states, 25% of all voters believed that then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris was out of touch and ‘focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class,’ according to polling following President Donald Trump’s victory.”

It’s far worse than that. The DSA agenda is no less than the destruction of American Liberty. Here’s hoping that the reason the polls have been so wrong is that more Americans are waking up to the DSA threat.

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