Polling has long been a battleground for political spin, but a new claim from veteran strategist Dick Morris, reported by American Thinker, suggests the manipulation may go even deeper—and be far more deliberate—than most voters realize.
Morris, citing a study by Patrick Ruffini at Echelon Insights, argues that national pollsters have systematically overstated Democratic support during the summer months of congressional election years, only to quietly correct those numbers as November approaches. The pattern, he says, is not random error but an intentional strategy designed to demoralize Republican voters and donors at a critical point in the electoral calendar.
“They’re wrong in July and August,” Morris told American Thinker, “then they get more and more correct as September and October roll around, so as not to be embarrassed in November.”
The claim arrives with fresh ammunition from this summer’s primaries. In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Abdul Mohammed El-Sayed was given double-digit leads in public polls but barely won by a single point. In Florida, Alexander Vindman—a former military officer and frequent critic of the GOP—led by nearly twenty points in polling, only to lose to socialist Angie Nixon by twelve. For many on the right, these examples are proof that polls are not merely off, but routinely skewed.
An Audience of One: The GOP
The key insight of Morris’s argument is that the inflated summer numbers are not aimed at voters or even at Democrats. Most voters, after all, don’t tune into politics until after Labor Day. Instead, the intended audience is Republicans—particularly those in leadership and donor roles who might read the summer polls and conclude that the cycle is lost before it’s truly begun.
American Thinker writer J.R. Dunn, who authored the piece, is blunt about the effect. He describes a Republican establishment prone to defeatism, ready to look at the weekly poll numbers and cry, “It’s over… Nothing can be done… Let’s all go home now…”
That reaction, he argues, is precisely what the poll inflation is designed to produce. By creating the impression of an insurmountable Democratic wave months before voters actually cast ballots, pollsters can suppress Republican enthusiasm, depress fundraising, and encourage premature concessions—both in the media and among party insiders.
Dunn names figures like Benny Thompson and Mark Halperin as examples of otherwise knowledgeable observers who have bought into the narrative, despite what he describes as a Democratic Party that is “broke,” “slammed by scandal,” and “rent in twain” by internal socialist factions.
The “Ratchet” Sign
What makes the Echelon study significant, according to Morris, is its scale. Ruffini reportedly analyzed several hundred polls spanning multiple congressional election cycles. The consistent finding: Democratic overstatement is most pronounced in mid-summer, then gradually narrows as the election approaches—a pattern that strongly suggests coordination rather than random sampling error.
This “ratchet” effect has been suspected by many Republican operatives for years. The informal practice of adding three to five percentage points to GOP numbers in public polls has become almost a folk ritual among conservative commentators, with many noting that it often brings the numbers in line with actual results.
Dunn goes further, calling the polling industry itself “bogus” from top to bottom, and dismisses even respected pollsters as part of the same corruption. “It’s an industry run by leftists and Democrats,” he writes, “and the devil can take ’em.”
No Confidence in the Numbers
The broader lesson for Republicans, Dunn stresses, is to ignore the polls entirely and focus on the fundamentals: voter enthusiasm, grassroots energy, and the actual policy and demographic trends that will decide the election. He points to figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others who have consistently refused to be swayed by negative polling, and urges a kind of bullish perseverance.
“Eat your Wheaties, saddle up, and follow the flag,” he advises.
Critics of this view will note that polling skepticism is nothing new, and that every losing campaign claims the polls were rigged. But the specific pattern Ruffini claims to have found—a systematic summer inflation followed by a fall correction—is a testable hypothesis. If real, it would mean that public opinion data in the months before an election is not merely imprecise, but actively deceptive.
For Democrats, the same data would suggest that their candidates may be receiving a summer “halo” of artificially high support—which could lead to overconfidence and poor strategic choices. In either case, the integrity of the polling industry is once again under scrutiny.
The stakes are more than academic. With control of Congress at stake in November, the numbers that appear on screen in August and September shape the spending decisions of donors, the morale of volunteers, and the strategic calculations of campaigns. If those numbers are being manipulated to affect those decisions, then the impact on the democratic process is profound.
As Morris told American Thinker, the industry as constituted is beyond repair. “It has always been a bogus industry,” Dunn writes, “and it will always be a bogus industry in lieu of massive reforms that aren’t coming.”
So what is a concerned citizen to do? The simplest answer, for those who suspect the fix is in, is to read the polls with a skeptical eye—and to remember that the only number that truly matters will be counted in November, not in August.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/how-the-polls-inflate-the-dems/