Posobiec noted how many once-revered polling institutions have now shut down, calling it “amazing” to witness their downfall. “All the people that you targeted, the Monmouth poll has closed their doors, Ann Selzer has retired, 538 has been shut down, these are all the people that we were told were the gold standard,” he said.
He credited Baris for being one of the few pollsters who accurately called out their failures. “Who was the one guy all through 2024, especially through the fall, that was just like, 'they're liars'?… It was Rich Baris, the one guy who was slimed, who was smeared, who was attacked attacked, who they went after day after day after day. I just say, wait a minute, how come you guys don’t have jobs anymore, Donald Trump is in office, and Rich Baris, The People's Pundit, is standing tall?”
Baris made it clear that he has “absolutely no sympathy” for the pollsters who got it wrong. “They deserve this, they 100 percent deserve this,” he said. “In 2016, we were going through something as an industry. It was a little bit tough to navigate, but those of us who used new collection methods and tried to understand why people didn’t answer polls… we did okay, but it was only a few of us.”
“In 2020, Covid came and it was difficult because everybody was home. You we had all these zoomers and professional class people signing up, especially for online panels, and they're sitting there clicking how they hate Donald Trump all day,” he continued. “It’s was little difficult, and I understood some of that. But 2024 was not hard.”
Baris pointed to the absurdity of some polling results leading up to the election. “If you had a response bias so bad that you had Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa, then you should not be a public pollster. You shouldn’t be a pollster at all for anyone,” he said. “If you thought in any way, shape, or form that after the debate there was a bump for Kamala Harris and she was suddenly ahead and had the edge in this election, you should not be a pollster.”
He accused many polling firms of engaging in “narrative polling” rather than objective analysis, pointing to questionable funding sources. “Now we know, by the way, with some of the government funding we’ve seen, Jack, we know that some of these people are funded by incredibly odd, just odd sources,” he said. “I would never do something like that or get myself involved, especially not my public work with an arrangement that they have in some of these polling outfits.”
Baris concluded that the 2024 election was straightforward to poll, with Trump consistently in the lead. “The truth is, public opinion does not move like this—it doesn’t move as dramatically as these pollsters suggest,” he said. “The bottom line is, if we ever saw that there were some methodological issues and people needed to fix them, we can throw that out the window. 2024 was a fairly easy election to poll. Donald Trump was always going to win. Anyone who found otherwise was either lying, bad at their job, or just hedging because they’re a coward.”
