By Suzanne Bowdey

Donald Trump is an impossible man to predict — and if anyone’s learned that lesson the hard way, it’s American pollsters. “We are headed for more disaster,” Stanford’s Jon Krosnick warned in October about the numbers ticking steadily upward for Harris. A surprising number of articles leading up to the election even seemed to be preparing us for the predictions to be wrong. In the end, despite the changes so many firms claimed to make to avoid the embarrassments of 2016 and 2020, Krosnick was right. The race we were told to expect never materialized. Neither, thank goodness, did a Kamala Harris presidency.

“Can we just start with the total and utter collapse of polling?” Megyn Kelly declared on her show after Trump’s landslide win. “Polling, again,” she insisted, “is a lie. They don’t know anything. We were told it was so ‘tight, tight, tight.’ No one said he was running away with it.” And running away with it might be putting it mildly. When all was said and done, the 45th president crushed Harris, collecting every single swing state and the popular vote — by millions. So the question from the last eight years remains: is the industry biased, incompetent, in denial, or all three?

As John Zogby said during Newsweek’s post-mortem, the end result was pretty logical if you stepped back and looked from a layman’s perspective. “Everybody saw that the country was headed in the wrong direction and that a sitting president was mired in — at best — a 40 percent job approval rating.” Even so, he admitted, “the breadth of the Trump [victory] was rather astonishing.” And maybe, some have suggested, that’s just part of this president’s enigma. “What other politician has people with flags and boat parades? He’s unique in mobilizing people around his vision, and that may appeal to people who don’t trust the Establishment and will vote but not participate in polls,” Vanderbilt political scientist Josh Clinton theorized.

Or maybe it’s not that Trump is a mystery, but that pollsters just can’t accept how popular he really is. Those internal biases obviously didn’t affect Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell, who was one of the only experts to get it right. “And I would say not only right, but exactly right,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on the Hill.” “Our final call was Trump +3. And that’s right where the national popular vote is right now.” Of course, he points out, “We got laughed at all fall, because we said Trump’s going to win the national popular vote. And there were a couple other pollsters that agreed with us, but we were putting out poll after poll that showed this race is locked in. And that’s really where it was, because people know who Donald Trump is, and they know who the Biden administration [is].”

To be fair, Mitchell said, other people in the industry may have noticed the same trend but weren’t allowed to publish it. “Some of them have people above them, like managing editors, [who] just won’t let them put out things that are favorable to Donald Trump. I do think the corporate media interests align very strongly with the power structure in D.C., and so when an outsider candidate like Donald Trump comes along, there is some type of allergic reaction.”

While others were pumping out statistics that the race was tied — or amazingly, that Harris was leading — “my numbers stayed the same,” Mitchell explained. “Now, I will say,” he added, the industry is “a little bit better than last time. … [But then, there were outlets] like Reuters Ipsos [that] went from Trump +1 all the way to Harris +6 in like six weeks. You can’t really get there unless you’re trying, or you’re just really bad at your job.” These same people would “show that Donald Trump had like a 25-point favorability disadvantage. This is a person [who] got more votes than any Republican in history. There’s no way he has a favorability disadvantage. And time and time again, you’d see things like the number one issue being abortion. Absolutely not,” he insisted. “People can’t buy houses, people can’t afford to put food on their table, and they think the southern border is being overrun and like an invasion. So it is not abortion. And they were just totally wrong and bad at their jobs.”

But what’s so interesting, Mark pointed out, is that this election proved one thing most people are overlooking: we aren’t as politically divided as we thought. “[The Left is] losing — and it’s on these insane issues.” Honestly, he said, “I really do think that this country is aligned with the MAGA principles of rebuild the middle class, stop having countries that hate us take advantage of us, secure the border, deportation, more jobs for Americans. Almost everybody supports that kind of thing.” And if you look at the metrics, they support that. In a single election, the country moved to the Right eight full points. “We’re talking about over 10 million people changing their minds or showing up to vote in a massive way that they haven’t before.”

He explains that the same way House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) did: Americans aren’t stupid. They see, for example, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) or Joe Biden calling for unity. “But these are the same people — the elite — that just called them all ‘garbage’ and ‘Nazis,” Mitchell shook his head. The same people “selling their future down the river.”

One thing the Left and its talking heads grossly underestimated, at least in the urban areas, was the concern over rising crime. “You think of a major city in the United States,” CNN data expert Mark Enten said. “Donald Trump put up the best Republican performance for a Republican nominee for president in at least 20 years, if not the entire 21st century. We’re talking about Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco. Across the map, Donald Trump put up historically strong numbers for a Republican candidate for president in places that, truthfully, if you would have asked me eight years ago, I would have never thought possible.”

And what’s driving it, Enten believes, are two twin issues: lawlessness and immigration. “I think immigration … is part of it. But I think crime is a big part of it as well,” Enten responded. “If you look at Gallup polling, you ask Democrats nationwide, 'Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with our efforts to control and bring down the crime rate?’ What you see is the dissatisfaction number now versus a decade ago.” The number of “satisfied” (59%) in 2014 virtually flipped with the unsatisfied (58%) a decade later. “… The crime rates have, simply put, moved a lot of these voters to the Right.” Including Hispanics, who Democrats thought could be bought by open border promises. And yet, as Mitchell underscored, “Hispanic voters polled just like white voters. They absolutely support deportation. In fact, a majority want the border to be militarized.”

“If that doesn’t give you pause [as a Democrat], I don’t know what will,” Enten stated.

But then, as Mitchell argued, part of the problem is that the Democratic Party “is just in shambles from a thought leadership perspective.” “You have like 25-year-old Redditors running [Harris’s] social media accounts, and you have the newsroom at MSNBC basically doing all of the thought research. I think the pandering arc has finally died. When you have an administration that just ruins everybody’s pocketbooks and then tries to gaslight people that everything’s great … it just doesn’t work.”

Where both sides need to be honest with themselves, he urged, is that this massive demographic shift — including black voters running for the exits of the Democratic Party — didn’t just happen overnight. And while the Left disputes that Harris lost big with black males, the reality, Mitchell countered, is these skeptics are the same people who think “abortion was the number one issue.” “Here’s the thing. They’re doing live interviews at polling places. Black male voters are not going to tell a reporter from NBC News who they voted for. And we use anonymous robo [calls] and online panels. So I think we’re right. And I think this is the biggest story [is] black voters are fleeing the Democrat[ic] [side].”

The most important thing this autopsy should reveal to everyone is that Americans can’t take anything for granted. No matter what the media says or the experts project, the real power is in showing up and voting. Polls don’t decide the election, people do. And at the end of the day, they’re what matters.

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.