The mainstream media have a technique as elections approach.
- They declare which specific issues are on the electorate’s minds, then
- They declare that since the Democrats are the candidates who have the right solutions to those specific problems, naturally the Democrats will win, and then
- They share polling that has been carefully curated to support this theory.
There are obviously three flaws in this approach, which the mainstream media count on the rest of us not noticing:
They could be (intentionally) wrong about which issues are foremost in the voters’ minds; the Democrats could be (and are) the cause, not the solution, of those problems; and the polling they cite may be wrong, biased, or manufactured.
Let’s look at all three elements of this technique in order.
The Issues
As the mass media have drifted further and further from the impartial reporters of news that we once thought them to be, and have instead become ever more blatant advocates of one side or the other, the choice of issues covered and pushed in the news has become the foremost tool of modern media bias.
We are taught to think of press bias as how a story is reported, but the much more important tool of press bias is a much earlier choice: the decision on which stories should be covered at all.
The press has spent decades perfecting the selection of which news events and statistics to feature and which ones to spike. Look at any mass shooting, for example: if the killer is a white male, it’s on the front page for weeks or months; if the killer was a minority, such as a transgender or muslim, the story fades from the headlines as soon as the sexual, ethnic, or religious identity is made public. Why? Because all that matters is the agenda.
The press has clearly chosen certain issues for this cycle to push hardest, among them:
- Housing unaffordability.
- Gasoline and diesel fuel prices.
- “Democracy” – whatever that means to them, these days.
- The statistically miniscule abuse of innocent non-criminals by ICE.
Such issues have dominated both the news headlines and the Op/Ed pages this year. But is their list even remotely accurate as a measure of the public mind in 2026?
Looking back on recent presidential elections, we must recall that President Trump won solid victories – near landslides – in 2016 and 2024, and likely in 2020 as well (since the judiciary refused to hear most of the significant election fraud cases concerning 2020, that year has to have an asterisk, to use the baseball analogy).
And President Trump won his victories primarily on the public’s desire for American energy production supremacy, a return to American manufacturing dominance, and a crackdown on such big-picture criminal justice issues as the illegal alien invasion, the fentanyl epidemic, and government program waste, fraud and abuse.
Is it reasonable to believe that the public would make such massive swings in their concerns, just depending on whether it’s a leap year or not? That every presidential year, people think about one group of issues, and every midterm, people are concerned with a completely different list?
That position has never really made sense.
The press just cites the issues that they hope will work for them, and hope that nobody notices.
The Solutions
The press believes that Democrats are the candidates who have the solutions on their featured issues – or at least, they believe they can convince the public that it’s the case.
But are they right about this? Will the public agree that – even if these are indeed the issues at the top of their minds – the Democrats are the ones who have the solutions to them?
On housing: Yes, rents and house prices are relatively high at the moment. But there’s a reason for that: The Democrats imported somewhere around 30 million illegal aliens in recent years, overloading both public and private housing stock, bankrupting the system and creating massive housing shortages.
On top of that, massive property tax increases and the effect of inflation on remodeling and new home building costs have all contributed to the increased housing prices.
The voters know that Democrat policies drove all these problems; why would they think Democrats would be able to solve them?
On gasoline and diesel prices: It’s first important to remember always that fuel is both a driver and a consequence of inflation, and that the inflation caused by Biden era overspending is as much a cause of today’s high energy prices as the Biden era attacks on pipelines, drilling and fuel transportation.
In addition, the public remembers decades of Democratic politicians promising to end the use of petroleum by intentionally making it unaffordable, by bans, overregulation, increased fuel taxes, and forced alternatives. Democrat policies have closed 20 refineries in recent years, even as our consumption of fuel has increased, so we need more refineries, not less.
How could voters think these same Democrats who purposefully drove up the cost of fuel, would ever revoke their own policies to lower the price of a product they hate?
On “democracy:” The Democrats claim to oppose much of President Trump’s record based on the claim that he is “acting like a king” (an ancient Roman attack often used as a justification for assassination). This claim, too, can’t stand up to scrutiny.
Recent Democrat regimes have been infinitely more monarchial than either Trump administration has been. Democrat presidents have issued stacks of Executive Orders in direct contradiction to laws passed by Congress. They’ve illegally opened the borders, illegally funded those aliens’ housing, transportation, education and food. They’ve both directly and indirectly poured billions of dollars into propping up enemy governments and organizations like Iran and Hamas. They’ve illegally regulated American manufacturers to advance the anti-CO2 idiocy of their climate hoax. They’ve illegally mandated dangerous experimental drugs for private citizens and even fired people for legally refusing to accept them.
The Trump administrations, knowing that everything they do would be challenged in court anyway as a stall tactic, has scrupulously ensured that every decree, every policy, every executive order has been legal, either under powers granted by the Constitution or granted by acts of Congress.
The only reason the Trump administration has had to have so many E.O.s is that the Republican margins in Congress are so incredibly narrow. The solution to that problem obviously isn’t to elect more Democrats; it’s to elect more Republicans.
And finally…
On the abuse of innocent non-criminals by ICE: Reporters desperately want to believe that ICE is rounding up busloads of “people who look different from us” – and picking up US citizens or legal green card holders in every net. This simply isn’t true.
ICE has proven to be very professional throughout this crisis, and is taking extraordinary pains to only deport true illegal aliens, and to ensure that everyone they arrest is indeed a criminal. The claims of abuse and overreach that the press has pushed have been proven untrue, and the public knows it.
New Issues
In addition, much of what was only a suspicion during the 2024 cycle has become proven fact in 2025 and 2026. Most Americans had no idea how much corruption there was at both the federal and state levels, perpetrated by Democrat bureaucrats, foreigners, and illegal aliens across the country and across the world (see the Somali daycare scandals of Minnesota, the USAID scandals of Washington DC, and the Medicaid scandals of California, for a start).
So we are moving into an election cycle in which the Trump administration has been successful on the issues of 2024, the Republican party is on the same side of the public on the new issues that have surfaced since, and the Democratic party is plainly responsible for all the problems that are cited as key issues in 2026.
The Polling
Accurate polling is arguably impossible in an era without land lines; at minimum, the business has been made incredibly more complicated. Even honest pollsters who do their best are stymied by the difficulty of reaching the right mix to get a representative sample.
Even so, pollsters who want to provide skewed results still have the same tools at hand that they always did: the selection of the pool and the way questions and possible answers are worded.
- Does a poll look at mere residents, or registered voters, or likely voters?
- Does a national poll focus on swing districts, or does it attempt to use 400 other unchangeable districts’ results to color the mood imagined for the remaining 35?
- Which questions are asked, how are the choices worded, how much leading is there?
These kinds of tactics have been in the toolbox of the partisan pollster forever, and they’re as handy today as they ever were.
Think of your top five issues in the coming election. Now imagine being asked the question “A high percentage of drug dealers, robbers, rapists and killers, when young, were frequently unengaged students, often absent from class for days or weeks, and thus never got an education to speak of. Would you support greater efforts to control truancy, to ensure that children stay in school to maximize the odds that they’ll grow up to be productive members of society? Yes or no? How about on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is most emphatic?”
The natural answer, without time for deliberation, is “yes,” of course: if they’re enrolled in school, they should go.
But how many ways can that question be interpreted, if the pollster (or his client) wanted to be partisan?
A “yes” answer could be used to support leniency for criminals, based on the social justice claim that such criminals didn’t have any choice but crime, so their actions aren’t their fault. A “yes” answer could be used to justify laws to restrict or even ban homeschooling. And an emphatic “yes” answer could be spun as a claim that this issue is high on the list of the voter’s priorities, even if he wasn’t thinking about it at all until the question was posed!
That’s just one example. Think back on every time you’ve been polled, and you’ll realize it’s common. They often ask seemingly straightforward questions and provide a variety of possible answers, and only later do you realize how creatively they could be spun.
The brilliant British comedy series “Yes, Minister” once included a perfect example of this matter, describing how a single pollster’s question could cause a majority to either vigorously support national service (we call it the draft) or vigorously oppose it, depending entirely on how the questioning is worded.
Because this tactic has been in use for so long, more and more Americans are aware of it now, and refuse to participate – making the job that much harder for pollsters trying get intelligent people to participate in their surveys.
Public polling – especially at this time of year – is therefore most often used as a subject for partisan news stories or a tool to generate fundraising, not as a genuine, practical read on the odds of victory or loss in the upcoming election.
Note that none of this means either that President Trump’s party will definitely win or that Mayor Mamdani’s party will definitely win. It’s too soon to know, and polls simply can’t be that accurate, this far out, in a nation of 340 million people.
But with such a divergence between the lived experience of those 340 million people and the blatant partisanship of the people in control of the news cycle, the one thing we can be sure of is that, whatever the mood of the electorate may be, the mainstream press isn’t the place to go looking for it.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar. And as a member of the Chicagoland theatre community, his next performance will be as Archie in Brigadoon from October 3 through 18, 2026.
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