Citizens' expectations of who will win is best indicator & media knows it Who voters expect will win represents the best indicator of who will actually win, according to The Hill's Andreas Graffe. Certainly he is not alone in this assessment. Having studied polling for years, I surmise that this idea holds the status of a truism among pollsters. Of course expectations have a dominating influence on who actually wins. Expectations matter so much because voter turnout matters enormously. Essentially pollsters know how most people will vote if they turn out. The problem? They don't know who will actually come out and vote. The liberal media and NeverTrumpers have attempted to instill the expectation that Hillary will win for months so they can impact voter turnout. Usually expectations are impacted most effectively by authors and commentators writing and speaking with the assumption that Hillary will win, almost as if to assert anything contrary represents a clearly uninformed statement. They attempt to make those who disagree with them seem ignorant of the zeitgeist and out of touch bumpkins. We've all seen this, and while it enrages conservatives, it works on the lesser informed casual observer. When Monica Crowly dared to suggest that Trump can still win last night, Megyn Kelly looked bemused and quickly turned to Democrat Bill Burton, doubtfully questioning if Trump could chip away at Hillary's lead enough to win, and Bill gave her what she wanted saying, "this race is cooked." Wink wink Hillary Two Alternate Universes Newt had just made the argument to Megyn in a widely publicized confrontation that two alternative universes exist, one where the race is over and one that questions the pollsters' assumption that Hillary can reproduce a 2012 huge minority and millennial turnout. Megyn clearly likes the traditional pollsters' universe more, where it is clearly absurd to consider the possibility that one of the two major candidates who is within five points has any chance of winning. Yay democracy! On this point, Newt has a good argument. On the very same day, the two following sentences appeared in polling stories about the presidential election polls by major and respected pollsters. USA Today on 10/26: "If her lead holds up until the results are tallied on Nov. 8 — no sure thing — Clinton would carry the White House by the widest margin in the popular vote of any candidate since Ronald Reagan's 49-state landslide in 1984." Fox News on 10/26: "With less than two weeks to go, the race for the White House has narrowed as Hillary Clinton now has a three-point advantage over Donald Trump. That’s within the margin of error of the national Fox News Poll of likely voters."

Nothing really happened to make all the polls shift at once, except that we passed the twenty-one day until the election mark. These shifts in the polls indicate that now the pollsters know they are being graded so it's time to get the polls right. RCP chart reflecting the pollsters' universal shift from their inflated Clinton leads The simple fact is that the media polls, if one does not carefully ferret out and give the proper weight to polls designed to suppress the Republican vote, will give a false picture of the election right up until three weeks before the election. This is a political strategy designed to prop up Democrats during the early vote period and make everyone think the election is cooked, as Bill Burton suggested last night. Short-Circuiting Trump's Strategy The assumption and constant proclaiming that the election is over is an attempt to short-circuit Trump's basic strategy. Trump wins in negotiations by imposing pressure on this opponents. The Art of the Deal makes clear that one must be willing to walk away at any point, so nothing is more integral to Trump's basic strategy than brinkmanship. The brink in this analogy represents a choice, where we go one of two directions. The media wants to avert voters' eyes away from the brink by making them think Trump has no chance, that there is no choice, just go back to sleep. So when Megyn says it's over, she is really saying she wants you to believe it's over so you won't look at the brink. It's not over, and the media knows it When enough battleground states for Trump to reach 265 electoral votes are within a point or two in the poll averages, the race is not over. Trump can win in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania too. We need to let this election play out. The media's constant attempt to tell you it's over demonstrates perhaps better than anything that the race is not over. My Twitter account is just getting started. Follow me here!