John James is running for the United States Senate in Michigan against Democrat incumbent Debbie Stabenow.  Among other recent events, John James held a rally in Grandville, Michigan on Saturday October 6th. About 300 people showed up to support his campaign.

Polls currently show a major uphill battle for candidate John James.  The realclearpolitics.com average as him down by 17%:

Are those polls correct?  If so, that is a lot of ground to make up in less than a month.  If not, how could so many polls be so wrong?  Well, lets look at a couple of these polls…

John James is doing the best in the Mitchell Research poll showing Stabenow winning by 13 points.  In the poll people were asked who they voted for in 2016, the result was +8% for Hillary:

The problem with +8 for Hillary is that she is over represented compared to Trump voters, in 2016, Trump won Michigan 47.3% to 47%.  Fixing this to be accurate of 2016 would make it a 5% race.  Given this poll was taken in mid-August, the margin of error is 3%, and 5% of those polled were undecided, John James could easily win.

The two more recent polls, Detriot News/WDIV-TV and EPIC-MRA, don’t share many of the details, which makes it hard to tell how they arrived at their results, however in the Detriot News poll there is some interesting information.  According to the poll, Debbie has 99% “name identification” while John James has only 58%, so almost half of the people polled never heard of the guy!  No wonder hardly anyone polled is going to vote for him.  I am guessing once people learn who he is, the numbers will change because he has everything you want in a candidate:

• He is black (which means nothing to me, but we all know the political world we live in)
• West Point graduate
• Combat Veteran / Apache Pilot / Army Ranger
• Beautiful young family
• Business owner / job creator
• God fearing

The answer to the question, “are the polls correct?”, is probably not.  The next question is, how can so many polls be wrong?  It does not seem possible that so many different polls would arrive at the same wrong conclusion…does it?  The 2016 election cycle showed us that polls can be off…WAY OFF and not just a poll here and a poll there, but MOST POLLS CAN BE WAY OFF MOST OF THE TIME.  Michigan polling probably was the worse of any set of polls in the entire country that got multiple races very wrong.

• Michigan polls within a week of the general election were off by about 4%
• Michigan polls overall for the general election were off anywhere from 5% to 16%

Look at that list!  Only two of forty-two polls had trump winning the state, one poll had a tie, however, what you will see next makes the above “got it wrong” pollsters look good.  The 2016 Michigan primary, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary by 1.5%.  Do you know what all the polls said leading up to the primary?  Hillary would win by 20%, 30%, 37%! 

The lesson is that pollsters, while getting responses from real people, are guessing about  lot of things, plus these pollsters are commissioned by the fake news.  That is how you get fake polls.

I do not know if John James will win, but I have a hard time believing that he is losing by 20 points.