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After Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ sham indictment of former President Donald Trump in mid-August 2023, the propaganda press wrote another addendum to the political obituary of the odds-on favorite for the Republican Party presidential nomination. 

John McLaughlin predicted Trump would win the 2024 presidential race in a landslide. 

As Trump’s longtime pollster, McLaughlin’s confidence in his candidate shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Nor was it surprising that the self-important corporate media polling firms scoffed at McLaughlin’s poll showing Trump leading President Joe Biden by 4 percentage points and clobbering the Democrat by 8 points in the critical swing states. 

Much has changed since that late-August 2023 McLaughlin & Associates poll, most notably Biden’s exit from the race in July and the Democratic National Committee’s anointing of Vice President Kamala Harris to take the president’s place. 

But McLaughlin’s numbers and his prediction have aged quite well. Trump came away with a massive victory in last Tuesday’s election, winning 312 electoral votes, trouncing Harris by some 3.3 million votes and going 7-0 in the swing states. He’s on pace to win the popular vote, something he did not do in his narrow victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

Meanwhile, many of the same pollsters who got it wrong in 2016 and 2020 got it wrong again in 2024. The final PBS/NPR/Marist election poll had Harris up by 4 percentage points, outside the 3.5 percent margin of error. The Washington Post joyously reported on Halloween that Harris enjoyed a “big early-vote” lead over Trump. Scary. 

Fortune’s Nov. 2 headline declared, “October Surprise: Trump just blew a huge lead, and the Madison Square Garden Rally started the drop, says top data scientist.” Remember that whole Puerto Rico garbage joke at the New York City Trump rally? Yeah, voters didn’t, either. 

“Donald Trump is suffering an historic descent in the campaign’s final days, an ongoing freefall that’s turning what looked like a walkaway for the former president into what’s most likely a Kamala Harris victory. That’s the view from Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, whose proprietary model’s proven right-on in past elections,” Fortune reported. 

Wrong.

Boils Down to Bias

News outlets and their pollsters comforted themselves by insisting that they had for months measured a tight race between the former president and Biden’s replacement. 

“Despite what you may have been hearing, the polls did well this election cycle,” the leftist MSNBC boasted.

”Pollsters always said it would be close, and that either candidate could win every swing state. That’s exactly what happened,” U.S. News & World Report gamely insisted.

You could fertilize your garden with such excuses. 

Most pollsters couldn’t imagine that Trump’s MAGA message was resonating with a majority of voters across the country — including some pretty deep blue states led by lawmakers who want to see the 45th president in prison. The political number crunchers largely and badly undervalued Trump’s support and his Election Day performance. 

Why? You would think that they might have learned a thing or two in 2016 when headlines declared Clinton held a better than 90 percent chance of beating Trump and 2020 presidential polls claimed Biden maintained significant — even double-digit — leads just days before the election. The latter election cycle exposed the highest error margins in 40 years, according to an analysis by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. 

It just boils down to bias, McLaughlin said. 

“I think sometimes a lot of the media pollsters let their bias determine what they see in the polls, and it didn’t have to go that way,” he told The Federalist Monday afternoon in an interview on the Simon Conway Show, on NewsRadio 1040 WHO in Des Moines. 

Had corporate media at least been honest with themselves about the condition of the country and the cognitive condition of Joe Biden, they may have seen Trump’s decisive victory coming. Trump Derangement Syndrome has clouded a lot of leftist minds over the years, to their political detriment. 

‘Time to Make the Case’

The man who took a bullet campaigning to “Make America Great Again” set out after the red trickle of 2022 to craft a campaign, an agenda, and a message that resonated with Americans not happy with Biden, Harris, and the state of their nation. McLaughlin said he was with Trump and his campaign manager Susie Wiles at Mar-a-Lago to talk strategy for a race that would be two years in the making. They had good tailwinds coming in. 

“At the time, a majority of Americans disapproved of the job Biden was doing. We were leading in the national popular vote,” McLaughlin said. “I said to [Trump], ‘You know 90 percent of the Republican Party voters disapprove of Biden. You need to get up every day and attack Joe Biden for his public policy failures.’”

And that’s precisely what happened. Through the myriad attempts to end Trump, from investigations and indictments to lawsuits and lawfare, the former president’s polling numbers continued to rise. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June, the swords came out and the Dems’ coup pushed the old man out to make way for the relatively younger Harris. 

But McLaughin said Trump was campaigning on fixing inflation, closing the border, securing the country, cutting taxes and keeping America out of endless wars, while Harris was counting on “joy” and “vibes” — and eventually fear — to beat the left’s Public Enemy Not 1. The accomplice media’s polling bought into the Harris campaign’s schtick. 

While the Harris camp attempted to distance her from her boss even as the vice president claimed she played a significant role in the Biden administration, Trump hammered home that the self-proclaimed change candidate had four years to fix the problems facing the nation and failed to do so. 

“Fortunately for us there was enough time to make the case of, ‘Well if he failed, she’s part of that.’” McLaughlin said. “Where we were looking for votes was two-thirds of the country said we are on the wrong track, and the majority, almost 6 in 10 disapproved of the job Biden was doing. The majority disapproved of the job Harris was doing.” 

That was particularly true in the battleground states, where Trump’s approval ratings were above water while Harris was under by as much as 8 percentage points in the final days of the election. 

As of last Monday, Trump’s total vote count topped 75.1 million, nearly 1 million more than he posted in the suspect election of 2020. He widened his base, bolstering support from traditional Democrat voters, particularly black men and Hispanics. As The Federalist reported, the president-elect successfully targeted low-participation voters who vote infrequently at best. 

Many of the polls missed these growing areas of support, too. 

‘A Big Miss’

And then there was the Des Moines Register poll. 

Pollster Ann Selzer, who has long led the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll, laid a big egg in the Hawkeye State. Her work has been described as the “gold standard” for predicting the results of everything from the famed Iowa caucuses to presidential elections. 

Not this time. 

Selzer’s poll, published just a few days before the election, gave Harris a 3-point lead over Trump in deep red Iowa. It was as stunning as it was wrong. 

Trump won Iowa and its 6 electoral votes by more than 13 percentage points and 220,000 votes.  Selzer’s poll was the outlier of outliers. She called it a “big miss” in a Des Moines Register op-ed, and said her team has begun a review of the data. 

McLaughlin, like other critics, sees bias in the deeply flawed poll that Trump blasted as election interference. That it comes from the anti-Trump Des Moines Register comes as no surprise to the veteran pollster. 

“They know their position and they obviously let their bias get in their way again,” he said. “I think the Des Moines Register Board was looking to make national news and try to help Kamala Harris.”

He said it’s similar to The Washington Post/ABC News poll in late October 2020 that had Trump down by 17 percentage points to Biden in battleground Wisconsin. Biden ultimately claimed victory by less than 21,000 votes in the Badger State. 

McLaughlin said the Des Moines Register editorial board should “confess to their bias and tell they people they are sorry.” But the people of Iowa and the rest of the country know better, he said. 

“And that’s the best part about democracy. Don’t believe the polls, go vote,” the pollster said. 

Listen to the full interview with Trump pollster John McLaughlin.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.