Former Democrat presidential candidate Mike Dukakis warns Biden not to trust polls

— PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) July 4, 2020

“Particularly this year, [polls] should be studied cautiously…Being at 50, no matter how weak your opponent is, is no guarantee of success,” warned Dukakis in a code to Biden that said between the lines, “you’re not at 50, maybe 44. From my race, I should know.”

Dukakis knows the real numbers, the internal polls with demographic cross tabulations, will never be seen by the public and are likely neck and neck with both sides in the mid 40s and 5-7 percent undecided. However Biden seems to be basing campaign strategy on a supposed lead over Trump of past 10 points.

If publicly released polls produced consistently accurate data then how did almost every pollster get both Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election so wrong? Sure, some would have been in error. But virtually all of them? What happened is that, like today, the fake numbers took on a life of their own and, through liberal and Democrat fantasies, got turned from public relations devices to actual data. In other words, the Democrats and the Left began to believe their own con job.

Even as far back as the 1988 presidential election, a Newsweek/Gallup poll showed the aforementioned Dukakis with a 55-38 lead over George Bush the Elder. Bush beat him in November by almost 8 points in the popular vote and creamed him 426-111 in the electoral college. Bush won 40 of 50 states. With a win that commanding, it is likely Dukakis was never ahead. But, there was that Newsweek poll and many others just like it.

Granted, Dukakis didn’t do himself any favors when he was asked by Bernard Shaw of CNN, in a presidential debate whether, if his wife was raped and murdered, he would consider the death penalty. Dukakis robotically repeated his opposition to capital punishment.

“It was a question about Dukakis’s values and emotions,” his campaign chief, Susan Estrich, later recalled. “When he answered by talking policy, I knew we lost the election.” But many polls still showed Dukakis leading.

Dukakis took another hit following a Bush campaign ad that featured a rapist who killed a woman and stabbed her fiance in a 1987 home invasion. The murderer had escaped from a weekend furlough at a Massachusetts prison when the killing occurred. Polls for Dukakis still had him leading.

Then the Gipper landed a blow to his chin, “I think I dropped eight points in the week Reagan called me ‘the invalid.’ But I never took those early polls seriously.” Analysts think Biden has worse problems.

“I think Biden now is weaker than Dukakis in 1988,” said Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam. “Biden is battling an incumbent president who can wield the levers of power to his own benefit almost any time he wants. And Biden, you can argue, is no Dukakis…What can Biden take credit for? A serviceable stint as a small-state senator, eight years of unremarkable vice-presidential yeomanry, and — lest we forget — an unblemished losing record in presidential campaigns.”