BONUS: The Republican Feelings Industrial Complex

And how not to get suckered by it.

Before the 2022 midterms, Republicans were riding high. Governor Glenn Youngkin had just won a stunning victory in Virginia’s off-year election, President Biden’s approval rating was an anemic 40 percent, and Republicans were predicted to win the House and Senate in a blowout. 

But the “Red Wave” turned out to be a trickle. Republicans netted just nine House seats and drastically unperformed expectations in every consequential Senate race. This was entirely foreseeable in a cycle where many women were furious about the Dobbs decision and the GOP nominated hardcore Trump supporters with little political experience who made no effort to appeal to moderates or independents. Even Republicans were tepid on their nominees. Dr. Oz took just 31 percent in Pennsylvania’s GOP primary, while Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire won just 40 and 37 percent respectively. And JD Vance, who went on to win his race in Ohio, was the first choice of just 32 percent of the Republican electorate.

But the prevailing belief going into the election was that Republicans were destined to win 40 House seats and flip the Senate. That’s due in large part to a media and polling ecosystem crafted to feed Republicans’ insatiable need for news that comforts them and confirms their preferred narrative. Call it the “Republican Feelings Industrial Complex,” or RFIC, because, like arms contractors, it’s big business and highly invested in its own self-perpetuation.

Polls to the Souls

Republican-aligned pollsters like Trafalgar, Rasmussen, and McLaughlin play an important role in feeding Republicans a steady diet of happy talk. According to polling averages in 2022, Democrat John Fetterman narrowly trailed Oz by about half a percentage point. Senator Fetterman wound up winning by about five percent.

On the surface, this looks like a spectacular polling whiff. But if you exclude data from Republican firms, the polling average actually showed Fetterman with about a 3.4 percent lead — much closer to the actual margin. 

In 2024, non-partisan media has done a better job of ignoring garbage data. Republican polls are cited less frequently, and many major forecasters have unweighted or even removed them from their models entirely. And yet these pollsters still have a large and growing audience in right wing spaces.

Mark Mitchell, the current head of Rasmussen Reports, regularly tells audiences on Rumble, the Canadian YouTube clone preferred by MAGA patriots, that Trump is likely to win in a blowout. Trafalgar Group founder Robert Cahaly, who got 2022 stunningly wrong, routinely appears on Fox News, Real Clear Politics and Megyn Kelly’s podcast promising smooth sailing for Trump. And upstarts Patriot Polling, Quantas Polls and SoCal Strategies publish outlandish presidential polls, fail to disclose their partisan funders, and even admit that they are pushing out numbers to move polling averages towards Republicans. 

These firms don’t exist to provide useful information to the public. They exist to monetize Republicans’ feelings, because that’s where the money is.

Rush Limbaugh Is Dead. Long Live Rush Limbaugh.

On election night in 2020, Fox News correctly called Arizona for Biden. This caused an immediate freakout among its anchors, who actively pressured their own data team to retract the call — not because it was wrong, but because they knew their audience would be furious at having their expectations dashed. Every person in that shop knows that they work in the RFIC and their job is to tell the viewers what they want to hear, even if it isn’t true. Because if they won’t do it, then Newsmax and One America will.

And when Fox forgot and reported the actual news out of Arizona, the network faced such a massive backlash that it overcorrected and wound up paying $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems. Even the attempted coup on January 6 didn’t change the RFIC, which has only grown since Trump left office.

Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Shawn Ryan routinely take three of the top five slots in Spotify's podcast’s charts. Megyn Kelly, Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, Lex Fridman, Matt Walsh, Patrick Bet-David, Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk all appear in the top 100. Pod Save America is the only podcast aimed squarely at Democrats that makes the list. 

Television tells the same story, with Fox News averaging about 2.5 million nightly viewers, dominating MSNBC in every time slot. Newsmax is now seeing highs of about 500,000 viewers per night. More perniciously, the RFIC does more than simply reflect back to its customers what they want to hear. It also creates a permission structure for conservatives to behave in ways that might once have been unthinkable to them.

The RFIC’s reaction to the two presidential debates is instructive. The consensus takeaway from both events was universal: Biden was too old, Harris beat Trump. After the first debate, Democrat-targeted media roared into action, with Pod Save America, the Bulwark, and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein calling for the Biden to drop out. Democratic voters agreed, and within a month, Biden had stepped aside. Democratic media said the thing that was both true and good for the party.

In contrast, Republican media either ignored the second debate, claimed Trump won, or blamed the ABC moderators for daring to factcheck him. They knew that Republican audiences didn’t want critical analysis dissecting Trump’s performance; they wanted someone to tell them it was okay. The most truthful assessment came from, of all people, Robert Cahaly, who went on Fox News the next morning and claimed that, while Trump had lost, it would not affect his electoral standing.

Un-skewing the Polls?

Let’s return to where we began. Polling for the 2024 election is tight. Neutral forecasters, most notably FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, and Split Ticket, have Harris ahead by roughly two percent nationally, narrowly leading in the rust belt, and behind in the sun belt.

And yet it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who are panicking thanks to the RFIC. The Trafalgar Group recently released a survey showing a tied Senate race in Michigan (no), Trump up three percent in Michigan (no), and Kari Lake down just three percent in Arizona (no). Rasmussen Reports says Trump is up seven points nationally (no!) and insists that President Biden did not win Georgia in 2020 (stop it). And if that’s not comforting enough, Republicans have Fox, Newsmax, and their podcasts, plus an infinite scroll of YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers dedicated solely to assuring them that the GOP will perform well in November. 

Will Republicans perform well? Maybe. But conservative media and pollsters are not earnestly predicting it based on unbiased reporting and data. That ecosystem exists to monetize Republican feelings and shield its audience from reality. And as long as coddling right wingers is big business, the Republican Feelings Industrial Complex will continue to grow. 

Editors Note: Joe will be giving us polling content on the pod and in print through election day.