Pollsters Jim McLaughlin and John Zogby told Newsmax on Thursday that low turnout among Democrats and high enthusiasm for President-elect Donald Trump helped Trump defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
McLaughlin, partner at McLaughlin and Associates, said on "National Report" that "Democratic spin and … liberal bias in the media" helped inflate Harris' polling numbers in public polls compared to her campaign's internal polls, which reportedly never showed her leading Trump before Election Day.
McLaughlin said his firm "publicly released our polls ourselves and Tony Fabrizio's poll, we were the Trump campaign pollsters on October 10th and we had President Trump ahead in every single battleground state, and we were attacked for it at the time."
McLaughlin added: "As soon as the exit polls came out on election night, 70% of Americans said the country was off on the wrong track, and the American people had an easy comparison: who was a better president? Kamala Harris and [President] Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, and the reason why Donald Trump won and Republicans control all three branches of government is because they knew Donald Trump was a more successful president."
Zogby, founder of John Zogby Strategies, blamed low turnout among Democrats for Harris' loss and credited high turnout for Republicans, including a surge in mail-in voting among the GOP, for Trump's victory.
"We got a signal from campaign insiders as well as Democratic operatives that things were not going well because they had that kind of throw-in-the-towel language the last couple of weeks," Zogby said.
He added that top Democrats "didn't expect Harris to win. That's what they were saying."
Zogby went on to say that "most of" the polls "were right," adding that "Trump won the national vote by 1.6 percentage points and you had a lot of … one-point races, two-point races. That was pretty good."
Zogby noted that his own final poll before Election Day showed Harris "ahead by 2.4 and I know where I went wrong, which is we assumed that the turnout would be roughly even between Republicans and Democrats. We went in with 37% Republicans, 36% Democrats. The reality was, at least as far as the exit polls were concerned, was 35% Republican, 31% Democrat."
"The level of enthusiasm among Harris supporters was just as high as the level of enthusiasm among Trump supporters, and that just didn't materialize," Zogby said.
"Republicans were turning up in such high numbers, early voting in ways that we had not seen in years past, which really helped to kind of send Trump on his way into the White House."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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