POLS AND POLLS APART

 

THE BOARD ROOM – “Hi, I’m with Margin of Error Pollsters, and we’d like to poll the next presidential race for only one million….” That’s as far as I got. ABC, The Washington Post and Fox all agreed to throw me out. I only wish they had first opened the door. Yes, the hardest job in America must be pollster salesmen, because they made a fool out of so many in the 2016 presidential elections. So let’s take a look at what happened, especially here in Texas.

The biggest loser was, obviously, Hillary Clinton (we shall call her Hillary so as not to confuse her with what’s his name), who thought she would win because everyone told her so because the polls said so. Twice she had run for president, and twice she had lost. Today she is writing her multi-million-dollar tell-all memoirs, and also penning thank you notes to those who (twice) donated millions to her campaigns and have zilch to show for it. Poor George Soros and all his fat cat friends. Goldman Sachs could have booked a lot cheaper speaker. Alas, when you lose your soapbox, or TV show, your stock falls faster than a speeding bullet. Soon Hillary will join David Letterman and Bill O’Reilly waiting, like everyone else, for a good table at a restaurant.

I couldn’t find a single poll that showed Donald Trump would win the presidency, did you? What happened, we now know, is that more people who were surveyed said they would vote for Hillary than Trump, and they did exactly that. Hillary got 2,850,691 more votes than Trump (65.8 million to 62.9 million). We keep forgetting that the voter polls were correct, but they didn’t matter. How do you poll an Electoral College? Trump won that vote count 306 to 232. The tipping point was all those blue-collar, high school grads in the Rust Belt. Donald promised them good jobs, and they’ll get them, some day. Maybe. On the other hand, perhaps you really can fool some of the people all of the time.

In future presidential campaigns, news organizations will be very leery of hiring polling companies with their very expensive price tags. Wonder what Chuck Todd at NBC will do next go-round? He rose to prominence, and now even has his own Sunday morning talking heads TV show, because of his polls, pie charts and percentages. “Sixty-seven out one hundred Presbyterians over 30 with less than a college degree in Ohio will….” Lucky him. He even kept his job.

Let’s now look at Texas. Did you know you gave money to Donald Trump? If you ever bought a ticket to a Houston Texans game or watched them on TV, Texan’s owner Bob McNair gave the Trump inauguration $1 million. Considering what McNair paid J.J. Watt to sit, injured on the bench, a million is not that much. But don’t let news of that donation get around Houston, because Texan fans did a sharp turn away from the GOP: Back in 2012 in Harris County, Barack Obama edged out Mitt Romney by a tiny .08 percent. Four years later, county voters went for Hillary by a hefty margin: 54 percent for Hillary to 49 percent for the Trumpster. (As for Cowboy fans, Dallas County was even more lopsided: almost 2 to 1 for Hillary: 61 percent to 35 percent.) But overall, Texas is very red, and this being a winner-take-all state, in the Electoral College, Trump got all of our 38 votes. Maybe we’ll finally get a real space shuttle.

In Texas in 2012, Romney beat Obama by a huge 57 to 41 percent. Last November, Trump won Texas by a slimmer margin of 52 to 43 percent. Trump did worse in Texas than all seven GOP candidates running for statewide office, even though two counties – Jefferson (Beaumont) and Fort Bend (Fort Bend) – flipped from the Dem presidential candidate to the GOP nominee. According to Texas Monthly, Roberts County near the top of the Panhandle (pop. 929) went 95 percent for Trump, but in Starr County on the border (McAllen) Trump only got 19 percent. In Kenedy County, which is down on the coast and hosts mostly cattle and oil rigs, Hillary got 99 votes while Trump got 84.

Now we turn to Loving County, out in far West Texas, which is the least populated county in the U.S., with a population of 86. The county is also unique for having the lowest percentage of people with college degrees of any county in the US: 2.6 percent. Loving County has voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1972, except in 1992 when the county backed Ross Perot. A 2010 census found only 40 people of voting age, but they cast 57 votes for Trump to 4 for Hillary. Other candidates garnered 3, so 64 votes out of a population of 86 with 40 eligible voters. Loving is not alone. In 2015, eight Texas counties listed more votes than voters. The counties — Loving, Brooks, McMullen, Roberts, Irion, Jim Hogg, Culberson and Polk — listed a combined 52,298 registered voters. But the latest U.S. Census data show only 49,457 voting-age residents in those counties. Trump was right all along: the presidential election was rigged, but in whose favor, as he asked Putin?

So these results show that, while Texas voters were not particularly warm towards Trump, it was “Anyone but Hillary.” We chose the evil of two lessers, and we were not alone: Surveys showed these were the two most disliked presidential candidates in our history. Another reason Trump won was that Democrats are undisciplined while Republicans take their marching orders and obey. An example: You know those instructions beside hotel bathtub-showers: “Put shower curtain in tub before showering.” Democrats will never do that, but Republicans will, even if it takes them 15 minutes to get the curtain off all those little plastic pegs.

 

Ashby votes at ashby2@comcast.net