How Pollsters Hurt the Republican Party But Please the Establishment

You want to know why the GOP won’t win elections? Notice the word is “won’t”, not “can’t.”

Here’s the reason. They won’t because they’re comfortable losing. They show this by releasing polls to Politico showing how the one surviving wing of the GOP with any clout, the House GOP, is more unpopular than its Democratic House adversaries; they show it by listening to pollsters like David Winston encouraging them to abandon their principles so they can “connect” with voters.

At the House GOP retreat, Winston informed them that his poll numbers showed they were less popular than the Democrats, at 27% to the Dems 46%. Winston, along with fellow pollsters Kellyanne Conway and Dave Sackett said that Mitt Romney lost because he was seen as out-of-touch with Americans.

There are two questions to be answered here: First, why were the results of this private poll released to Politico, the house organ of the Obama Administration? The only seeming reason is to bully hard-line conservatives to fold on the debt ceiling battle by encouraging a defeatist attitude. This would please establishment Republicans who don’t have the stones for a fight. 

The second question is why the pollsters would want to have the information released; and one possible answer is that if the party subscribes to the pollster’s perspective, it tacitly acknowledges it is dependent on them to figure out what the American public is thinking so the party can adapt accordingly.

Whichever reason turns out to be right, the ones who benefit by the leak as well as the results are establishment Republicans, who were terrified by the Tea Party’s dominance in 2010, and pollsters, who are parasitically feeding off the fear of those in power.